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Cottage Pudding
Put two and one-half breakfast cupfuls of mixed butter and lard into a basin, and warm and beat to a cream with one breakfast cupful of sifted, crushed loaf-sugar. Stir in one well-beaten egg and one teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda dissolved in one breakfast cupful of milk, and add to it a little grated nutmeg. Put one pint of flour into a basin, and work into it two tablespoonfuls of cream of tartar; add to it the other mixture, stir well, place the whole in a buttered basin or mould, and bake in a brisk oven for forty-five minutes. Then turn the pudding out onto a dish, pour round or over a little sweet or wine sauce, and serve.
A plain butter cake baked in a pudding basin and sauced at table. Two of the quantities as printed do not balance, and they are the first thing to settle before you start.
- The fat is almost certainly a misprintThe fat looks like a misprint -- two and one-half cupfuls of butter and lard against one cupful of sugar and one pint of flour is far outside any workable cake ratio; the batter would be a grease slick. Half a cup (4 oz) with this amount of flour behaves properly.
- Cream of tartar is also out of proportionTwo tablespoonfuls (six teaspoons) to one teaspoonful of soda is triple the usual leavening pair. The standard period ratio is two parts cream of tartar to one of soda, so two teaspoons here; more leaves a sharp sour tang and can collapse the crumb.
- Breakfast cupfulRoughly a modern 8 oz cup, though Victorian breakfast cups ran to 10 oz. Treat it as one cup and adjust by feel; the batter should drop thickly from the spoon.
- Loaf-sugarSugar sold in a hard cone and broken up at home, which is why it is crushed and sifted. Granulated caster sugar is the direct substitute.
- Brisk ovenA brisk or quick oven is usually reckoned around 400-425F, but that is too hot for a deep basin over forty-five minutes. Bake at 350-375F and test with a skewer at 40 minutes.
- Basin or mouldA greased 1 to 1.5 quart pudding basin, charlotte mould or 8-inch round tin. Butter it well and dust with flour so the pudding turns out whole; let it stand five minutes before inverting.
- The sauceSweet sauce means a simple sugar-and-butter sauce thinned with water or milk; wine sauce is the same with sherry or Madeira. Either wants to be poured hot over a warm pudding.
- YieldSix to eight servings from a basin of this size. It is best the day it is baked.
Cottage pudding is the nineteenth-century answer to the problem of dessert without a pastry cook: a plain, cheap butter cake, baked rather than boiled in a cloth, and dignified at the table by a hot sauce. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a reminder that the book is not purely a record of Waldorf service but a broad household compendium, gathering domestic English and American receipts alongside hotel dishes. The chemical leavening here is of its moment: bicarbonate of soda paired with cream of tartar, worked dry into the flour, was a common home substitute before packaged baking powder came to displace the two-jar method. Wine sauce is the more formal of the two accompaniments; lemon and plain sweet sauces are also commonly given with cottage pudding.