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Puff Pudding
Mrs. C. A. Rogers.
Five tablespoons of flour, five tablespoons of milk, five eggs stirred smooth; turn on a pint of boiling milk, and bake twenty minutes. To be eaten with hard sauce.
A batter pudding of the popover family: five eggs, a little flour, and scalded milk, baked until it climbs the dish. The original gives no oven temperature, no dish size and no yield, so the notes below fill those in.
- The hinge: pour the boiling milk slowlyAdd the pint of boiling milk to the egg-flour-milk paste in a thin stream while whisking hard, or the eggs will set into threads and the pudding will never rise. The batter should end up thin and smooth, roughly the consistency of heavy cream.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Twenty minutes suggests a brisk oven; a reasonable modern equivalent is around 425F. A slower oven risks setting the custard before the steam can lift it, giving a flat, eggy slab.
- Dish and volumeThe batter runs to about a quart. A buttered 1.5-quart baking dish or deep pie plate suits it; individual cups will cook faster, in 15 to 18 minutes. Preheat the buttered dish so the batter hits hot metal or ceramic.
- Do not open the ovenThe rise is steam, not chemical leavening. There is no baking powder in the recipe and none is wanted. Opening the door before the top is set and brown collapses it, and it will not come back.
- TablespoonsSpoon measures in this period were often rounded rather than level, though the books are rarely explicit, so five tablespoons of flour may mean somewhat more than the level 5 tablespoons a modern cook would measure. Err toward the larger amount if you want the pudding to hold its shape after cutting.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce. It is butter creamed with about twice its volume of powdered sugar, flavored with brandy, sherry, vanilla or nutmeg, then chilled firm. A spoonful set on the hot pudding melts into it, which is the whole point.
- Serve immediatelyPuff puddings deflate within a few minutes of leaving the oven. Have the table and the sauce ready before it comes out. Serves six.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the great wave of North American charity cookbooks, a genre commonly traced to Civil War-era fundraising publications, compiled from recipes donated by named local women and sold to raise money for a benevolent institution; the attribution to Mrs. C. A. Rogers is the whole editorial method in miniature. This one is a batter pudding, cousin to Yorkshire pudding and to the popover, all of them depending on egg and steam rather than on suet or breadcrumbs, and all of them descended from the English habit of baking a rich batter in the heat left in the oven or under roasting meat. Hard sauce, the standard accompaniment here, was the American name for what English cooks generally called brandy butter; it appears with baked and boiled puddings in books of this period, and its keeping quality in a cold pantry was part of its appeal.