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German Pudding
A. S. Ewing.
Beat six eggs separately until very light; add one pint milk to the yolks, six tablespoons flour, one-half spoon butter, one-half nutmeg and saltspoon salt; stir in whites of eggs last. Bake half an hour.
SAUCE.-Six tablespoons sugar, one-half pound butter worked to a cream, one egg, one wineglass wine, one-half nutmeg; put on the fire and let it come to a boil.
This is a baked batter pudding — closer to a Yorkshire pudding or a popover than to a custard — served under a hot wine-and-butter sauce. The original gives no oven temperature and no dish size, so both need supplying.
- Oven heatBake at 375F. Half an hour suits a shallow buttered dish of about 2 quarts; a deeper dish will need 40-45 minutes and the centre should be set and puffed, not wet.
- Get the dish hotWith this much egg to so little flour, the pudding rises on steam. Butter the dish and heat it in the oven before pouring in the batter, and do not open the door during the first 20 minutes.
- "One-half spoon butter"Genuinely ambiguous — most likely half a tablespoon, since the flour is measured in tablespoons, which is roughly a quarter of an ounce of melted butter; the batter does not depend on it.
- Small measuresA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. Half a nutmeg, freshly grated, is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 teaspoons of ground nutmeg — assertive by modern taste, and it appears twice, in pudding and sauce.
- A wineglassIn American books of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Sherry or madeira would suit.
- The sauce is the risky partHalf a pound of butter creamed with one egg, then boiled, will separate or scramble if pushed. Warm it gently over low heat or a bowl of simmering water, whisking constantly, and take it off as soon as it thickens and steams — the recipe's "let it come to a boil" is an instruction to disregard.
- Sauce proportionsHalf a pound of butter to six tablespoons of sugar makes a great deal of very rich sauce for one pudding. Half the quantity serves six comfortably; the sugar can be raised if you want it sweeter.
- Yield and servingServes six. Batter puddings collapse within minutes of leaving the oven, so bring it to the table straight away with the sauce already made and kept warm.
"German pudding" was a loose label in nineteenth-century American cookery, applied to a range of egg-heavy baked and boiled puddings understood to come from German kitchens by way of immigrant neighbours — the name signalled origin rather than any fixed formula. What is here is the standard batter pudding of the English-speaking kitchen, eggs beaten separately for lift and the whites folded in last. The wine sauce places it firmly in the company-dinner category: The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s from contributions by Chicago householders, each recipe signed by its donor. The heavy hand with nutmeg is characteristic of the period, when whole nutmeg and a small grater sat on the kitchen shelf as a matter of course.