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Cottage Pudding (II)
Mrs. Ira Metcalf.
One teacup of sugar, three tablespoons melted butter, one egg, one teacup of milk, two heaping cups of flour, one teaspoon of soda, two of cream tartar. If the milk be sour, leave out the cream tartar. Bake in a pan about half an hour; add fruit if you like, it is quite an improvement.
A plain one-egg cake, leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than commercial baking powder. The original gives no oven temperature and no sauce, both of which the modern cook has to supply.
- Teacup measureA nineteenth-century teacup is not a fixed measure; it is variously reckoned at anywhere from about 6 to 8 fl oz. If you read it as a modern cup, one teacup of sugar is about 7 oz/200 g and one teacup of milk 8 fl oz.
- Heaping cupsTwo heaping cups of flour is roughly 10-11 oz/300 g by weight. Scooped level it will be closer to 9 oz, and the batter will be looser than intended; weigh if you can.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the cook judged her own range. Bake at 350F in a greased 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan; half an hour is about right, and a skewer should come out clean.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is a homemade baking powder in a proportion common in nineteenth-century receipts; modern commercial powders are built on different acids. Taken at face value the equivalent is nearer 4 teaspoons of baking powder, which is more leavening than a modern cake of this size usually carries.
- The sour-milk noteLeaving out the cream of tartar with sour milk is the whole logic of the recipe: the acid in the milk reacts with the soda instead. Use buttermilk, not milk that has simply gone off in the refrigerator.
- MixingCombine the leavening with the flour and add it to the wet ingredients last, then get the pan into the oven promptly. Soda-and-cream-of-tartar batters begin releasing gas as soon as they are wet.
- FruitThe recipe does not say how much or what; about a cup of berries or sliced apple suits a cake this size. Toss it in a spoonful of the flour first so it does not sink.
- ServingServes six to eight. Cottage pudding was usually eaten warm under a sauce -- hot lemon or vanilla sauce, or thin custard -- which this entry does not supply.
Cottage pudding is a nineteenth-century American compromise: a plain butter cake baked in a pan and served hot with a sweet sauce, which let it stand as a pudding at the end of a meal without the long steaming a suet pudding demanded. Recipes for it multiply in community cookbooks from the 1870s onward, often in two or three versions contributed by different women. The instruction about sour milk is a mark of the period's dairying: households had milk turning on the shelf as a matter of course, and the recipe spells out that acid milk called for soda alone while sweet milk needed cream of tartar to activate it. Attribution to a contributor by her married name, Mrs. Ira Metcalf, was the standard form in cookbooks of this kind.