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Fanny L'S. Batter Pudding
Six eggs, eight tablespoons flour, one quart sweet milk, very little salt. Bake in a quiet oven.
A bare-bones batter pudding of the English sort: eggs, flour, milk, salt, and an oven. The original assumes you already know what the batter should look like and how long to leave it, so the gaps are worth filling.
- "A quiet oven"That means steady and moderate heat with no fierce top heat; in modern terms somewhere in the moderate range, around 325-350F. Batter puddings baked too hot set on the surface before the interior cooks and then collapse into a rubbery layer.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, distinguished in period books from buttermilk or clabbered milk. Whole milk is the right substitute; skim gives a thin, watery pudding.
- Eight tablespoons flourThat is half a cup, and by modern weight about 2.25 oz of all-purpose flour. It makes a very loose batter for a quart of milk and six eggs, closer to a baked custard than a popover.
- MixingWhisk the flour with a little of the milk first to a smooth paste, then thin with the rest and beat in the eggs. Adding all the liquid at once leaves lumps that are hard to beat out later.
- Vessel and timeA buttered baking dish of at least 2 quarts; the batter is bulky for its dish once the eggs are in. At a moderate oven allow roughly 45 minutes to an hour, judging by eye: it is done when the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean, with a slight wobble that firms as it stands.
- Yield and servingSix to eight servings. A pudding like this was sent to table hot with a sweet sauce, stewed fruit or simply sugar and cream; on its own it is deliberately plain.
Batter pudding is one of the oldest surviving English pudding forms, a descendant of the boiled and later baked batters that also gave us Yorkshire pudding, and by the nineteenth century a plain version of eggs, flour, milk and salt was well established, though many recipes of the period still carried butter, sugar or nutmeg, and boiled versions persisted alongside baked. Its appearance in The Home Cook Book under a contributor's name is typical of the compiled charity cookbooks of the 1870s, in which Chicago and other city women each sent in a household standby and the collection was sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless. The brevity is not carelessness but shorthand between cooks who all knew what a batter pudding was; the recipe's value to its first readers lay in the exact proportions, which are the only thing that distinguishes one woman's pudding from another's.