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Batter Puddings Baked
One quart of sifted flour, butter the size of an egg, one pint of milk, half a teaspoonful of salt, four eggs. Scald the milk and melt the butter in it. When partly cooled, stir in the yolks of the eggs well beaten, then the salt and flour. When quite cold, stir in lightly the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Bake in saucers. Serve immediately with a sauce. Hard sauce or fruit sauce.
A popover-type batter baked in individual dishes, served hot with a sweet sauce. The proportions as printed need a hard look before you begin.
- The flour figure is suspectA quart of sifted flour is roughly 4 cups, about a pound, against only a pint of milk and four eggs. That is far stiffer than a batter that can be poured into saucers. Many printed batter puddings use appreciably less flour in proportion to the milk, so the quart may well be an error; it is safer to add the flour gradually until the batter just coats a spoon.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book was written for a wood or coal range. A hot oven suits this sort of batter, and something in the region of 425F is a reasonable modern starting point; a cooler oven tends to give a flatter, more custardy result.
- "Bake in saucers"Shallow ovenproof dishes — ramekins, small gratin dishes, or a muffin tin — buttered and heated in the oven before the batter goes in. Fill no more than two-thirds.
- Why the batter must be coldThe instruction to cool the scalded milk fully before folding in the whites is the hinge. Warm batter deflates the whites, and the pudding rises poorly.
- Serve immediately means immediatelyThe steam that raises these puddings escapes within a couple of minutes of leaving the oven and they sink. Have the sauce made and the table ready first.
- The saucesHard sauce is butter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavoring -- brandy, vanilla, or nutmeg -- served cold so it melts over the hot pudding. Fruit sauce in books of this period usually meant a cooked, sweetened fruit sauce or a thin preserve rather than fresh fruit.
- YieldDepends on the size of the dishes, but the quantities as printed will fill considerably more than a half-dozen saucers.
Batter puddings are the plainest branch of the English pudding family: flour, milk and eggs beaten together and set by heat, the same formula that becomes Yorkshire pudding when it is baked under roasting meat and popovers when it is baked in a deep tin. In earlier centuries they were often boiled in a cloth or bag, and baking them, especially in small individual vessels, is generally said to have become more common later. The direction to bake in saucers is a reminder that cooks improvised freely from the china cupboard. Its place in a general American cookbook reflects how useful such a pudding was, built from what was always in the house, and dressed up entirely by whatever sauce the cook could spare.