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Cottage Pudding
1 cupful sugar 1 egg 1 cupful milk or water 2¼ cupfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2½ teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 cupful sultana raisins
The book gives the ingredients and leaves the method to the cook, which was normal for a plain cake batter in 1913. A few notes fill the gaps.
- No method is printedThis is the standard quick-cake procedure: beat the shortening and sugar, add the egg, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder and salt alternately with the liquid, and fold in the raisins and vanilla last. The batter should drop heavily from a spoon, not pour.
- Oven and panNo baking instruction is printed. A moderate oven, around 350F, in a greased 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan for roughly 35 to 40 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean, suits a batter of this size. Cottage pudding is generally cut in squares from the pan rather than turned out and iced.
- Only two tablespoons of fatThat is very little shortening for two and a half cupfuls of flour. The result is a dry, tight-crumbed cake, of the sort usually served soaked in a hot sauce rather than eaten alone.
- CriscoThen a newly introduced all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, sold as a cheaper and more stable substitute for lard. Modern vegetable shortening behaves the same way here; unsalted butter also works, though the crumb will be softer and browner.
- Sultana raisinsClosest to what is now sold in the United States as golden raisins. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in so they do not sink to the bottom.
- Cupful and teaspoonfulLevel measures, as in modern American practice: the cup is 8 fluid ounces. Two and a half teaspoons of baking powder works out at one teaspoon per cupful of flour, in line with current practice.
- The sauce is the pointCottage pudding is usually served warm under a hot lemon sauce, vanilla sauce or hard sauce rather than plain.
- YieldNine generous squares, or twelve smaller servings with sauce.
Cottage pudding is the American answer to the question of what to do when there is no time for a steamed or boiled pudding: a plain butter cake baked in a pan, cut hot, and drowned in sauce. The name, which appears broadly in American cookbooks from the middle of the nineteenth century, signals modesty rather than any particular place, and the dish survived into school and boarding-house cookery well into the twentieth century for exactly that reason. Its appearance here is commercial as much as culinary. The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, shortly after the launch of Crisco itself, and its recipes were written to show that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for lard and butter across the whole range of ordinary cooking. A pudding this familiar, calling for only two tablespoonfuls of the new fat, looks very much like a low-risk way to get the tin into the pantry.