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Cottage Pudding (IV)
M. R. Beard.
One-half cup of sugar, one cup of milk, one pint of flour, three tablespoonsful of melted butter, one teaspoonful soda, two of cream of tartar, two eggs, a little salt; bake one-quarter of an hour in small pans.
A plain butter cake leavened with soda and cream of tartar, baked in small tins and meant to be eaten warm under a sauce. The original gives no oven temperature and no sauce, both of which the period cook supplied from habit.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in this book: one pint is two cups, roughly 8-9 oz of modern all-purpose flour scooped and levelled. The batter should be thick but pourable; add milk by the spoonful if it is stiff.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is home-mixed baking powder, equivalent to about four teaspoons of the commercial kind. It reacts the moment the batter is wet, so mix quickly and get the pans into the oven.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term at all. Small cakes of this type are usually baked around 375-400F, which suits the fifteen minutes stated. Test with a straw or skewer at twelve minutes.
- Small pansMuffin tins or individual gem pans, filled two-thirds. Baked as a single 8-inch square instead, the same batter would need considerably longer than the quarter-hour given.
- Melted butterThree tablespoons is a lean cake by modern standards. Let the butter cool slightly before it meets the eggs, and beat the eggs and sugar together first so the batter does not curdle.
- The sauce is not optionalThe sauce -- Cottage pudding is a pudding largely because of what goes over it. A hot lemon or vanilla sauce, or a hard sauce of butter and sugar, was the usual accompaniment, though this recipe names none.
- YieldAbout a dozen small cakes, serving six to eight when sauced. Best eaten the day they are baked; without much fat they stale fast.
Cottage pudding is one of the common filler recipes of nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and this collection carries several versions, distinguished here by number. The name signals modesty rather than any particular dish: a plain cake batter baked quickly and dressed with a hot sauce, so that a pudding could reach the table without suet, long steaming, or expensive fruit. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening is typical of the period before commercial baking powder had displaced home-mixed leavening in the household kitchen, when cooks could buy the two powders separately and combine them in the bowl. Recipes in this collection appear under contributors' names, and M. R. Beard's version is characteristically terse -- it assumes the reader already knows what oven she keeps and what sauce her family expects.