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Cherry Pudding
Take two eggs; one cup of milk; one and one-half cups of flour; one tablespoon of melted butter; onehalf teaspoon of salt; one teaspoon of baking powder; two pounds of cherries. Beat the eggs light, add to them the milk, the salt and the butter, then the flour and lastly the baking powder. Beat well and turn into a well-oiled baking-tin. Lay the stoned cherries on the top, press them down, sprinkle them rather thickly with granulated sugar and bake in a quick oven for twenty-five minutes. Serve hot with cream sauce. This pudding may be varied by stirring the cherries into the batter and steaming it in a mold for one hour.
A plain batter pudding with fruit pressed into the top — close kin to a clafoutis, and just as dependent on a hot oven. Two things need translating: the oven and the sauce, which the book assumes you already know.
- A quick ovenUsually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. The batter has to set and rise fast around the fruit; at 350F it will stew in the cherry juice and stay heavy. Twenty-five minutes suits that heat in a shallow tin.
- Pan sizeNo dimensions are given. This quantity of batter suits a 9-inch square or a 10-inch round tin — a shallow layer before the fruit goes on. In anything deeper the centre will not cook in twenty-five minutes.
- Two pounds of cherriesStoned, that is about 5 to 6 cups, which is a great deal of fruit for this much batter and is clearly intended. Sour cherries would hold up better here than sweet ones; if using sweet cherries, cut back the sugar sprinkled over the top.
- No sugar in the batterThat is not an omission. All the sweetness comes from the sugar scattered over the fruit, which melts into a light glaze. Sprinkle it "rather thickly" — 3 or 4 tablespoons.
- Baking powder lastAdding it at the end, after the flour is beaten in, turns up often in recipes of this period; the single-acting powders then in use began working on contact with liquid. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but the instruction still argues for getting the tin into the oven promptly.
- Well-oiled baking-tinButter or a neutral oil; period cooks often used lard. Cherry juice caramelises hard at the edges, so grease generously or line the base.
- Cream sauceThe book means a sweet pouring sauce, not a savoury white sauce: cream or milk thickened lightly, sweetened and flavoured with vanilla or nutmeg. Plain cold heavy cream serves the same purpose.
- The steamed versionStirring the fruit through the batter and steaming an hour in a covered mold gives a wholly different pudding — dense, moist, no crisp top. Fill the mold no more than two-thirds and keep the water at a steady simmer.
- YieldSix to eight servings. It is best within an hour of coming out of the oven; the fruit weeps as it cools.
Batter puddings with fruit dropped into them are old and widespread — the English batter pudding, the Limousin clafoutis — and all of them exist because a thin flour-and-egg batter is the cheapest way to stretch a glut of summer fruit into a hot dish for a whole table. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for readers running households on a budget, is full of exactly this sort of arithmetic: two eggs, a cup of milk and whatever the tree gave. The chemical leavening dates it. Baking powder was increasingly displacing saleratus and sour milk in American kitchens around the turn of the century, though soda-and-sour-milk recipes persisted well past 1900, and its arrival is why a pudding like this could be beaten together and baked in under half an hour rather than steamed for two — though the recipe, tellingly, still offers the steamed mold as an alternative.