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Cottage Pudding (Two eggs one cup sugar one cup)
Two eggs, one cup sugar, one cup milk, three and a half cups flour, one teaspoon soda, two cream tartar, one tablespoon butter melted and put in the last thing; steam one and a half or two hours.
A plain steamed pudding of the sort meant to be turned out and drowned in a hot sauce. The batter is leavened chemically rather than with yeast or long beating, so it wants to go into the mould as soon as it is mixed.
- The leavening"One teaspoon soda, two cream tartar" means one teaspoon baking soda and two teaspoons cream of tartar, the standard homemade baking powder of the period. Roughly four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder does the same work, though the older mix reacts immediately on wetting, so mix and mould without delay.
- The flour looks highThree and a half cups of flour against one cup of milk and two eggs gives a very stiff batter by modern measure, closer to a dough. Period cup measures were not standardised and flour was not always sifted; if the mixture will not drop reluctantly from the spoon, add milk a spoonful at a time. The original quantity is genuinely ambiguous and should not be followed blindly.
- Butter lastThe recipe is explicit that the melted butter goes in at the end, after the flour. Have it warm but not hot, or it will set in specks against the cold milk.
- How to steamButter a mould or basin and fill it no more than two-thirds, cover tightly with buttered foil or a cloth tied down, and set it on a rack in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up from a boiling kettle so the pudding never chills.
- Timing and donenessThe recipe offers one and a half to two hours; the longer time for a deeper mould. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the pudding has drawn slightly from the sides. Let it stand five minutes before turning out.
- It can be baked insteadCottage pudding is often met with as a baked pudding rather than a steamed one, though this receipt calls only for steaming. If you want to bake it, the batter slackened with milk will take a buttered square tin at 350F for about 35 minutes.
- ServingThe recipe gives no sauce, and a steamed pudding of this kind was meant to have one: hard sauce, a lemon or vanilla cornstarch sauce, or plain warm cream. Figure six to eight servings.
Cottage pudding is the plainest member of the nineteenth-century pudding family — a sweetened batter, no fruit, no suet, no spice, distinguished from cake only by the sauce poured over it and the fact that it arrived at table hot. The name is generally taken to mean a pudding within reach of a modest household. The steaming is the older habit: before reliable ovens, a pudding basin set over water on the range top was a dependable route to a hot sweet course.