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Batter Pudding (II)
Mrs. Hamilton.
Allow a pint of cold milk, four tablespoonsful of flour, two eggs, and a little salt; stir the flour smooth in a part and beat them well with the mixed flour; then add the remainder of the milk, and when well stirred together pour into a buttered dish and bake half an hour.
A very plain baked batter pudding of the kind that once sat between the roast and the dessert course. It is thin — four tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk — so expect something closer to a set custard with body than to a cake.
- The hinge: no lumps, no shortcutsThe whole method exists to avoid lumps: slake the flour with a few tablespoons of the milk into a smooth paste first, beat the eggs into that, and only then let down with the rest of the pint. Adding all the milk at once to dry flour is what the instruction is written to prevent.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as the book assumes a wood or coal range. Half an hour for a shallow dish of thin batter implies a reasonably brisk oven; a moderately hot modern oven is the closest equivalent, and a cooler one will need longer.
- MeasuresA pint in an 1877 Canadian book would normally be the imperial 20 fl oz rather than the American 16 fl oz. Using 16 ounces gives a firmer pudding, if that is preferred.
- "A buttered dish"Butter generously and use a shallow earthenware or metal dish, roughly 8 or 9 inches. A deep dish will leave the centre wet at half an hour.
- FlourNineteenth-century household flour varied in strength and milling from modern all-purpose. Plain all-purpose flour works; sift it, since the recipe relies on the flour dispersing rather than on any leavening.
- Salt and seasoning"A little salt" means about a quarter teaspoon. The pudding carries no sugar; whatever it was eaten with -- sugar, jam, or meat gravy -- arrived at the table, depending on the course.
- Yield and servingServes four as a side or a modest sweet. Serve it straight from the oven; a batter pudding this lean collapses and turns leathery as it cools, and it does not reheat well.
Batter pudding is one of the oldest surviving English pudding forms, made from the same flour-milk-egg mixture that, cooked under a joint of beef in its drippings, became Yorkshire pudding. Before tin ovens were common the batter was tied in a cloth and boiled; baked versions like this one spread through the nineteenth century as closed ranges made a steady oven heat ordinary in middle-class kitchens. It was cheap, filling, and endlessly adaptable — served savoury with gravy, or with sugar, treacle or preserves as a sweet. The attribution to Mrs. Hamilton reflects that book's method: it was assembled in Toronto in 1877 from contributions by named local women, each recipe carrying its donor's name as a kind of guarantee.