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Pudding
Mrs. Metcalf.
One teacup sugar, three tablespoons melted butter, one egg, one teacup of milk, two heaping cups of flour, one teaspoon soda, two cream tartar ; if the milk be sour leave out the cream of tartar ; bake in pan about half an hour. To put in a few currants improves it.
A plain baked batter pudding of the sort that doubles as a cake, leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than commercial baking powder. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what consistency to expect, so the main work of translation is in the measures and the oven.
- The teacupA Victorian teacup in receipt books is usually reckoned at around 6 fl oz rather than the modern 8 oz cup, though the measure was never standard and varied from household to household. Treat the sugar and milk as roughly 3/4 cup each; the flour is measured in "heaping cups" and is the least precise figure here, so add the last of it only until the batter drops thickly from the spoon.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, in about the classic 1:2 ratio. Modern double-acting baking powder does not behave identically; if substituting, the equivalent by the usual reckoning is nearer 3 to 4 teaspoons of baking powder in place of both, though many cooks would use less.
- Sour milkLeaving out the cream of tartar with sour milk works because the milk supplies the acid. Today's pasteurised milk does not sour usefully, it spoils. Buttermilk or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice gives the intended result.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, which in 1874 meant the cook judged the oven. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for a half-hour bake in a shallow pan.
- The pan"A pan" is not specified; a square or round tin of about 8 inches, greased, suits this quantity. In a deeper dish the half hour will not be enough; test with a straw or skewer to the centre.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small dark raisins, not fresh redcurrants. Half a cup is plenty, and tossing them in a little of the measured flour keeps them from sinking.
- ServingFiled among the puddings, which suggests it was intended to come to table warm, probably with a sweet sauce, hard sauce or a thin lemon or vanilla pudding sauce. On the quantities it would serve six to eight; eaten plain and cold the next day it is simply a plain cake.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1874) was an influential American charity cookbook, compiled from receipts contributed by named local women and sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless. The attribution to Mrs. Metcalf is the whole point of the format: readers were meant to recognise their neighbours and trust the recipe on the strength of the name. The dish itself belongs to the enormous 19th-century family of baked batter puddings, which sat somewhere between cake and dessert and were distinguished chiefly by being served hot with sauce. The alternative instruction for sour milk is a mark of a household that did not waste anything, and of a period in which the soda-and-cream-of-tartar calculation was still familiar even as commercial baking powder was displacing it.