Batter Pudding
Eight tablespoonfuls of flour, four eggs, one quart of milk, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, salt. Bake twenty minutes.
A bare-bones baked batter pudding of the kind written down for cooks who already knew the dish. Two things are missing from the text and have to be supplied by judgment: the oven heat and the pan.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Baked batter puddings want a hot oven, 425F, so the batter climbs and sets before it can settle into a custard. A moderate 350F will give you something closer to a heavy pancake.
- The pan matters more than the batterUse a shallow metal dish or muffin tin, greased and heated in the oven until the fat shimmers before the batter goes in. Batter poured into a cold dish sticks and stays flat.
- Twenty minutes is for small pansA quart of batter in one dish will need 35 to 45 minutes. Twenty minutes suits individual cups or a thin layer in a large shallow tin.
- Flour to milkEight tablespoonfuls is half a cup by modern measure, which is very thin against a quart of milk. Spoon measures of the period were not standardised and may well have been heaped, and other batter pudding recipes of the period often call for a good deal more flour to a quart of milk. Judge by consistency: a thin cream.
- Baking powderOlder batter puddings relied on eggs and steam alone. The two teaspoonfuls here are a later addition and are insurance rather than structure; the eggs still do most of the lifting, so beat them well.
- SaltUnquantified, as was usual. Half a teaspoon for a quart of milk.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk makes enough for six to eight. Batter pudding is served hot, straight from the oven, with a sweet pudding sauce or with the roast if you are treating it as Yorkshire pudding.
Batter pudding is the plain ancestor of Yorkshire pudding: flour, eggs and milk beaten together and set by heat, first as a boiled or steamed pudding in a cloth and later baked under a joint to catch the drippings. English cookery books carried it from the eighteenth century onward. The baking powder is the tell that this is a late version, one possible only after the 1860s, and once it was on the shelf cooks began adding it to batters that had done without it for two hundred years.