Home › Hot Puddings › Strawberry Cottage Pudding
Strawberry Cottage Pudding
1/3 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 1¾ cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Mix same as Cottage Pudding, and bake twenty-five minutes in shallow pan; cut in squares and serve with strawberries (sprinkled with sugar and slightly mashed) and Cream Sauce I. Sliced peaches may be used in place of strawberries.
A plain butter cake baked thin and served warm under fruit and sauce — the whole point is speed, so have the strawberries macerating before the batter goes in the oven.
- Mixing method"Mix same as Cottage Pudding" means cream the butter, add the sugar gradually, beat in the egg, then add the milk alternately with the flour and baking powder sifted together. Stop as soon as the flour disappears; this is a cake batter, not a bread dough.
- The flour quantityThe flour reads as 1 3/4 cups, which is what balances this ratio of butter, sugar and milk. The batter should be thick enough to drop heavily from the spoon rather than pour.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Twenty-five minutes in a shallow pan implies what period books called a moderate oven; around 350F is a reasonable modern working figure, but the recipe itself specifies nothing. A shallow pan of roughly 8 inches square gives a suitable depth, and a wider pan will bake faster.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 3/4 cups flour is heavier than modern practice, which runs to about one teaspoon per cup. Baking powders of the period were generally single-acting; with current double-acting powder many cooks would reduce to about 2 teaspoons.
- Cream Sauce IThis refers to another entry in the same book. In this dessert context it is a sweet pudding sauce rather than a savoury white sauce, though no details of it appear here. Any pouring cream, plain or lightly sweetened, serves the same purpose.
- The strawberriesSugar them and crush lightly at least half an hour ahead so they give up juice; the syrup soaking into the warm cake is the dish. Sliced peaches want the same treatment and a little more sugar if they are firm.
- Yield and servingRoughly six to eight squares, depending on the pan. Serve warm; cottage pudding dries out once cold.
Cottage pudding is a nineteenth-century American dessert answering the problem of dessert on a weeknight: a single-egg butter cake, baked shallow so it cooks fast, cut in squares and served with whatever sauce or fruit the house had. The name is generally taken to signal plainness rather than any particular cottage. This entry does not bother to repeat the method, simply pointing back to the base recipe and swapping in strawberries.