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Another (One cup sugar one egg one)
One cup sugar, one egg, one spoonful of butter, one cup sweet milk, one pint flour, two and a half teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder; bake three-quarters of an hour; serve with sauce.
This is a plain cup-measure batter pudding of the sort that fills pages of Victorian community cookbooks: mixed in one bowl, baked, and rescued by whatever sauce the cook had at hand. The original assumes you know the pan, the oven and the sauce, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- No oven temperature givenThe recipe says nothing about the oven at all. 350F is a reasonable modern default; three-quarters of an hour at that heat suits a batter of this depth, and you should start testing at 35 minutes if you use a shallower dish.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume, not weight. A pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of all-purpose flour. Spoon it into the cup and level it rather than scooping, or the pudding turns heavy.
- "One spoonful of butter"Genuinely ambiguous. In a book of this date it most often means a tablespoon, about 1/2 oz, which is consistent with the rest of the proportions; a scant tablespoon of softened butter creamed with the sugar is the safe reading.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because sour milk and buttermilk were the everyday alternative and would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk is what the recipe expects.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand, generally traced to Montreal in the nineteenth century and still sold in Canada. Any double-acting baking powder substitutes. Two and a half teaspoons to two cups of flour works out at about 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup, at the upper end of the usual modern range; with fresh powder two teaspoons is ample.
- Pan and yieldUse a buttered 1 1/2-quart pudding dish or an 8-inch square pan. It serves six to eight, cut in squares and served warm.
- The sauce is not optionalThe recipe directs "serve with sauce," and the pudding is plain enough to want one. A hot lemon sauce, a vanilla cornstarch sauce, or hard sauce of butter, sugar and a little brandy were all common pudding sauces of the period.
- DonenessA skewer in the centre should come out clean and the top should spring back. Because there is so little butter, it dries quickly once past that point.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally described as Canada's first fundraising cookbook. Its contributed-recipe structure explains the title here: "Another" marks it as one more variation in a run of similar cup-and-egg puddings. The family of recipes belongs to the period when chemical baking powder had become cheap and widely available enough to take over from beaten eggs and yeast in everyday baking, letting a cook put a hot pudding on the table with one bowl and three-quarters of an hour. Naming the brand was not unusual, and it served commercial powders well: they varied in strength, and a cook had reason to state the one whose measure she trusted.