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Peach Pudding
1 cup flour 2 tablespoonfuls butcup sugar ter ½ cup milk Left - over peaches, canned or fresh 1 egg 2 teaspoonfuls bakingpowder Cream butter and sugar, add well-beaten egg, milk, and flour and baking-powder sifted together.
Put a layer of peaches in a buttered baking-dish, pour the batter over, and bake. Serve with cream and sugar, or sweet sauce. Other fruits may be used instead of peaches.
A plain cake batter baked over fruit — what later cooks would call a cobbler or a buckle. The original gives no oven temperature, no baking time and no dish size, so those are the gaps worth filling before you start.
- The ingredient list, sorted outThe quantities run in two columns and interleave awkwardly: read them as 1 cup flour, 2 tablespoons butter, ½ cup milk, 1 egg and 2 teaspoons baking powder. The sugar survives only as "cup sugar" — its fraction has dropped out of the line, so the amount is an inference; ½ cup suits a standard one-egg cake batter of the period, and the rest of the proportions hold together.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. In a buttered 8-inch square or a 9-inch pie dish the batter needs 35 to 40 minutes, until the top is set and springs back and a skewer comes out clean at the centre.
- Baking powderTurn-of-the-century baking powder was often single-acting, so batters went into the oven at once. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but there is still no reason to let the dish stand on the counter.
- The fruit layerCanned peaches should be drained well; heavy syrup left in the dish will make the underside of the batter sodden. Fresh peaches want peeling and slicing, and if they are underripe give them a spoonful of sugar and fifteen minutes to soften before the batter goes on.
- Batter depthOne cup of flour makes a modest amount of batter. Spread the fruit in a single layer rather than heaping it, or the topping will not cover; in a dish much larger than 8 inches the cake bakes to a thin dry sheet.
- YieldFour to six servings. It is best warm, within an hour or two of baking; the cake firms and dries if it is refrigerated and eaten cold.
- Serving"Cream" here means unwhipped pouring cream. A sweet sauce of the period would be a hard sauce or a thin cornflour-thickened lemon or vanilla sauce.
This belongs to a whole family of American fruit-and-batter puddings — cobblers, buckles, grunts, sonkers — in which a thin cake mixture is poured over whatever fruit is on hand and baked in one dish. Its place in a book of left-overs is the point: half a jar of canned peaches, or the soft ones at the bottom of the basket, were not worth a pie crust but were worth a cup of flour and an egg. The recipe treats canned and fresh peaches as interchangeable without comment, and the closing line offers the batter to any other fruit the cook happens to have.