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Strawberry Pudding
Beat together to a cream two tablespoons of butter, a half cup of sugar and one egg. Then add quarter of a cup of milk, a scant cup of lightly sifted flour mixed with two scant teaspoons of baking powder. Bake in small muffintins about twenty minutes, and when done remove the centers, fill with crushed sweetened strawberries, and put whole berries on top. Dust with powdered sugar and serve with rich, sweet cream. CUSTARD SOUFFLÉ-Two tablespoons each of butter, flour and sugar, one cup of milk and four eggs. Scald the milk in a double boiler. Stir flour and butter together, add the boiling milk gradually and cook five minutes, stirring constantly. Beat the sugar and yolks of eggs together, add to the mixture and set away to cool. When cool add the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs, pour into a buttered pudding-dish and bake for thirty minutes. Serve at once. Fresh or preserved fruit may be placed in a layer at the bottom of the dish and the custard soufflé poured over. Peaches or apricots are adapted to this use.
FRUIT SOUFFLÉ-Any kind of fruit, either fresh or preserved may be used. When canned fruit is used, drain from syrup before proceeding further. Rub one cup of fruit pulp through a sieve, sweeten if necessary and heat. Add the stiffly beaten whites of three eggs and a few grains of salt to the hot fruit pulp, and beat thoroughly. Turn into a buttered baking-dish, set in a pan of hot water and bake until firm.
PRUNE SOUFFLÉ-Soak eighteen large prunes over night and stew in the same water until tender. Remove stones and mash to a smooth pulp. Mix the whites of six eggs with six tablespoons of powered sugar. Beat the mashed prunes into this, turn into a buttered pudding-dish and bake for twenty minutes. Serve at once with plain or whipped cream.
Four recipes run together here: a strawberry shortcake-style cake baked in muffin tins, then three soufflés built on beaten egg whites. All of them assume you know your own oven, since none gives a temperature.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given for any of the four. For the twenty minutes specified, the muffin cakes are best in a moderate oven, around 350-375F; the custard, fruit and prune soufflés are safest around 350F, since a hotter oven sets the edges before the centre rises.
- YieldThe strawberry pudding batter is small — one egg, a scant cup of flour — and will fill roughly six standard muffin cups, more if you use the small tins the recipe calls for. The custard soufflé serves about four; the prune soufflé, with six egg whites, about six.
- "Scant" and "lightly sifted"A scant cup means just under a level cup, and lightly sifted flour is spooned in rather than packed. Together they put the flour at roughly 3 1/2 to 4 ounces / 100-115 g. Weighing gets you closer than any cup measure here.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons in a scant cup of flour is generous by modern standards, where a cup of flour usually takes a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a quarter. A teaspoon and a half of modern powder gives ample lift without the metallic aftertaste that too much can leave.
- Removing the centersDo this while the cakes are just warm, not hot — cut a cone from the top with a paring knife and lift it out. Cooled cakes tear less, and the crushed berries will not turn the crumb to paste if the cake has had ten minutes to set.
- The soufflé hingeFold the beaten whites into the custard base only when the base is genuinely cool, as instructed. Warm base deflates the whites on contact, and the soufflé will rise less and weep. "Serve at once" is not decoration: these fall within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
- Fruit soufflé water bathSetting the dish in a pan of hot water keeps the sides from setting hard before the middle firms. Bake until the center is just set and no longer wobbles loosely — usually 25-35 minutes at 350F depending on the depth of the dish.
- Rich, sweet creamThis means heavy or whipping cream, poured unwhipped over the pudding. Half-and-half is thinner than what was intended.
- PrunesSold now as dried plums, and most are already soft enough that an overnight soak is optional; two hours in warm water is usually enough before stewing.
The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued cookbooks aimed at the same readership of home-managing women in the early twentieth century, and the puddings chapter reflects exactly what that reader was expected to produce: one basic creamed batter turned into a dozen dishes by what went on top of it. The strawberry pudding here is a shortcake in disguise — hollowed individual cakes filled with crushed sweetened fruit were a standard American treatment of berries in season, when strawberries arrived all at once and had to be used. The three soufflés that follow show the period's confidence with beaten egg whites. The prune soufflé in particular belonged to the winter end of the same repertoire, when fresh fruit was scarce and a household drew on dried, canned, and preserved fruit instead.