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Baked Batter Pudding
Mrs. Wyllie.
Beat separately the yolks and whites of three eggs, mix three tablespoons of flour with a pint of milk and a small piece of butter; add the eggs; bake in a quick oven. Serve with sauce.
A plain nineteenth-century batter pudding, close kin to Yorkshire pudding but served sweet. The original assumes you know how batter puddings behave, so most of the working detail is missing.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. The high heat is the point: it turns the water in the milk to steam fast enough to lift the batter before the egg sets.
- The hinge: a hot, greased dishPour the batter into a buttered dish that has been heated in the oven first. Into a cold dish it will sit heavy and pale rather than puffing at the edges.
- MeasurementsA pint is 2 cups by US measure (an imperial pint would be 20 fl oz). Three tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk is a very thin batter by modern standards, closer to a baked custard-pancake than a popover; the eggs are doing most of the structural work.
- Beating the whites separatelyFold the stiffly beaten whites in last, just before baking, and get the dish into the oven immediately. Beaten whites are the lift here; nothing else in the recipe raises it.
- Butter"A small piece" is perhaps a tablespoon. Melt it before it goes into the batter.
- SaltNone is listed. A pinch in the batter is worth adding even for a sweet pudding.
- Time and yieldExpect 30-40 minutes at that heat, until set in the centre and browned at the edges. Serves four; it deflates within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so carry it straight to the table.
- "Serve with sauce"In a book of this date that points to a sweet pudding sauce: a hard sauce of butter and sugar, or a thin lemon or wine sauce poured over.
Batter puddings have a long history in the English domestic repertoire, descended from the batter that was once set beneath roasting meat to catch the drippings and later baked on its own in a dish. By the time this recipe was collected the form is often said to have split in two: savoury under the joint, sweet with a sauce at the end of the meal, and this is squarely the second. Its brevity is characteristic of the community cookbook, where recipes were contributed by name -- here Mrs. Wyllie -- and written for neighbours who already knew what a batter pudding looked like coming out of the oven. Three eggs, a pint of milk and three tablespoons of flour made a hot pudding from what was already in the house.