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Cottage Pudding
Take one cup of milk; two eggs; one tablespoon of butter; one cup of sugar; three teaspoons of baking powder; flour to thicken, about one pint. Rub the butter and sugar to a cream and add the egg, well beaten, and then the milk, stirring all well. Sift the baking powder over the top, and before stirring it in, sift over it a little flour. Stir well, adding enough more flour to make a rather thick batter; then pour the batter into a buttered dish, and bake thirty minutes. Serve hot with foamy sauce.
A plain butter cake baked in a dish and sauced at the table — the recipe assumes a cook who knows what a cake batter should look like, so the few blanks are worth filling in.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given at all; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits this batter. Thirty minutes suits an 8-inch square or a shallow 2-quart baking dish; a deeper dish will want nearer 40 minutes and a skewer test.
- "About one pint" of flourA pint is 2 cups, roughly 8-9 oz of sifted flour. Treat it as a starting point rather than a measurement — the instruction to add "enough more flour to make a rather thick batter" is the real direction.
- The hinge: batter consistencyStop adding flour when the batter drops thickly from the spoon rather than pouring in a stream. Push it further and the pudding bakes dry and tough, which is the usual failure with this style of cake.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 2 cups of flour is heavy by current standards; period powders may well have been weaker or less reliably stored. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder should give ample lift without a soapy aftertaste.
- Sifting the powder over the topThe point of the step is to distribute the powder evenly before it is stirred in. Whisking the powder through the flour beforehand accomplishes the same thing.
- "Add the egg"The ingredient list calls for two, the method says "the egg" — a common slip in these books. Use both, well beaten, as the list states.
- ButterOne tablespoon is very lean for a cup of sugar; creaming will not aerate much. The result is a plain cake rather than a rich one, with the sauce carrying the richness.
- Foamy sauceThe companion sauce in books of this period is butter and sugar beaten to a cream with an egg, then thinned with hot water or wine and whisked over hot water until frothy. It must be served the moment it foams, as it falls on standing.
- YieldSix to eight servings, cut in squares and sauced hot.
Cottage pudding was a familiar dessert in American households, chiefly as a later-nineteenth-century fixture, and it appears in general cookbooks of the period, including this one. The name is often said to signal its station: not a boiled or steamed pudding requiring hours and a cloth, but a plain cake baked in whatever dish was at hand and made into a pudding by the sauce poured over it. That sauce is the point — hard sauce, lemon sauce, or the foamy sauce called for here — and the same square of cake could be served a dozen different ways across a month. Its persistence in such books says a good deal about the economics of home baking: one cup of sugar, one tablespoon of butter, two eggs, and half an hour of oven heat produced a dessert for a family of six.