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Minute Pudding
One quart of milk; one pint of flour; one teaspoon of salt; one teaspoon of butter; two eggs. Beat the eggs well, and add the flour and enough of the milk to make all smooth Place the rest of the milk on the fire in a double boiler, and when scalding hot, stir in the mixture of flour and egg. Cook ten minutes, add the salt and butter, and serve at once with sweet sauce.
A stovetop flour pudding of the plainest sort — closer to a sweetened batter porridge than to anything baked. It comes together fast, but the flour-to-milk ratio and the volume measurements need translating.
- The measuresOne quart of milk is 4 cups; one pint of flour is 2 cups scooped by volume, roughly 8 to 9 oz. That is a stiff ratio, and the finished pudding will be thick enough to mound on a spoon.
- The hinge: temper, then pourBeat the eggs, work in the flour with just enough cold milk to make a smooth, lump-free slurry — about a cup — before the hot milk ever touches it. Any dry flour left in the bowl will show up as pellets that ten minutes of cooking will not dissolve.
- Double boiler, and whyA flour-and-egg batter this thick scorches on direct heat and will curdle if it boils hard. The double boiler is not fussiness; keep the water below a rolling boil and stir steadily.
- Ten minutes is the minimumThe recipe gives ten minutes from the moment the batter goes into the scalding milk. Taste before serving: raw flour has a distinct chalky flavor, and if it is still there, keep cooking. A few minutes more does no harm.
- Salt and butter lastBoth go in at the end, after the ten minutes' cooking, rather than at the start; the recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat first. One teaspoon of salt in a quart of milk is a fair amount and correct for a dish with no sugar in it.
- Sweet sauceThe pudding itself is unsweetened; all the sugar arrives in the sauce. Period sweet sauces for puddings run to hard sauce (creamed butter and powdered sugar) or a thin vanilla or lemon pouring sauce. Either works; the pouring kind suits it better.
- Serve at once means itOn standing it stiffens and turns pasty. Spoon it out hot into warmed dishes.
- YieldSix generous servings, or eight small ones.
Flour-and-milk stovetop puddings of this kind were an everyday sweet of nineteenth-century American and British households -- cousins to hasty pudding (flour-based in England, cornmeal in America) and to the older flour "pap." They needed no oven fire and no suet, only pantry staples, and their plainness was part of the point: much of the interest came from the sauce poured over. That the pudding contains no sugar at all is a reminder of how sweetness was managed when sugar was worth spending carefully.