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One-Two-Three-Four Pudding
One cup butter, two of sugar, three of flour, four eggs (beaten separately), one cup sweet milk, and two tea-spoons baking-powder; flavor with nutmeg, and bake in pudding or cake mold; leave in mold till next day, when steam for three-quarters of an hour over a kettle of boiling water and serve with hot sauce. - Mrs. C. A. Malin.
A 1-2-3-4 cake batter baked, rested overnight, then steamed the next day to turn it into a pudding. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no timing for the baking, so both have to be supplied.
- The point of the two-day methodBaking the batter, letting it sit overnight, then steaming it is what separates this from plain cake. The rest should firm the crumb and the steam re-moisten it, giving a denser, slightly sticky pudding that takes hot sauce without collapsing.
- Quantities in modern termsOne cup butter is 8 oz, two sticks; two cups sugar is about 14 oz; three cups flour, sifted before measuring, is roughly 12-13 oz. Use large eggs. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk as opposed to soured milk or buttermilk.
- Oven heatNone is stated. A batter of this richness wants a moderate oven, 350F, for 45 to 55 minutes in a tube or ring mold, until a skewer comes out clean. A solid loaf-shaped mold will need longer and is more prone to a raw center.
- Beating the eggs separatelyThis means yolks beaten into the creamed butter and sugar, whites whipped to soft peaks and folded in last. It is the recipe's only real leavening help beyond the baking powder, and the folding should be gentle.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for three cups of flour is on the low side by modern standards, and period powders were single-acting and of variable strength rather than the double-acting kind sold now. Two teaspoons of current baking powder is adequate here; the pudding is meant to be close-grained, not airy.
- Leaving it in the mold overnightCover the mold once cool so the surface does not dry out, and keep it somewhere cool. If your kitchen is warm, refrigerate it and let it come toward room temperature before steaming, or add ten minutes to the steaming time.
- Steaming setupSet the covered mold on a rack in a large pot with an inch or two of simmering water, lid on, for 45 minutes. Top up with boiling water if it runs low. The mold should not sit directly in the water.
- NutmegFreshly grated makes a noticeable difference in a batter this plain. About half a teaspoon suits the quantity; period recipes often called for more nutmeg than many modern palates want.
- Yield and sauceServes 10 to 12. "Hot sauce" in books of this period generally means a butter-and-sugar sauce thinned with boiling water and flavored with wine, brandy or lemon; look to the book's pudding sauces.
The name is a mnemonic, not a description: one cup butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs, a ratio that let a cook carry the whole formula in her head without a printed book or a set of graduated measures. It was a widely copied American cake formula in the nineteenth century and appears under the same numeric name in a number of community and regional collections. What is interesting here is the second act. Rather than serve it as cake, Mrs. Malin turns a baked batter into a steamed pudding overnight, a thrifty maneuver of a kind that recurs throughout The Dixie Cook-Book (1883), which gives considerable space to puddings and their sauces. Steamed and boiled puddings, inherited from British practice, were a common dinner sweet in nineteenth-century American households, and a mold that could be baked, rested, and revived by steam gave a hostess a dessert ready a day ahead.