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Cottage Pudding
One-half cupful sugar, one egg, two tablespoonfuls of melted butter, one cupful of milk, two cupfuls flour, one teaspoonful cream tartar, one-half teaspoonful of soda. Bake one-half hour. To be eaten with liquid sauce.
A plain one-egg butter cake, leavened with cream of tartar and soda rather than baking powder, and served hot under a pourable sauce. The original assumes you know the pan, the temperature and the sauce.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was usual in recipes of this kind. Bake at 350F; half an hour suits an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan, and the cake is done when the center springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon of soda is the period substitute for baking powder, and it works out to roughly two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. If you use the original pair, sift them with the flour and get the batter into the oven promptly, as the reaction begins in the wet batter and does not wait.
- FlourTwo cupfuls would likely have meant a softer, lower-protein flour, closer to today's all-purpose than to bread flour. Modern all-purpose is fine; measure by spooning into the cup and leveling, about 250 g, or the cake turns dry and tight.
- No salt listedThe recipe calls for none, and salted butter of the period may account for it. With today's butter, add a quarter teaspoon to the dry ingredients.
- MixingBecause the butter is melted rather than creamed, this is a stirred batter, not a beaten one. Whisk sugar, egg, butter and milk, then fold in the dry ingredients only until no flour shows; overworking it after the soda is wet gives a rubbery crumb.
- "Liquid sauce"In this period that means a thin pourable sauce, not a hard sauce: a lemon or vanilla sauce thickened with cornstarch, or a simple butter-and-sugar sauce loosened with hot water.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Cottage pudding is meant to be cut warm from the pan and sauced at the table, which is the whole point of it; cold, it is simply a plain cake.
Cottage pudding is a common plain American dessert of the later nineteenth century: a plain cake baked in a pan and turned into a pudding by the sauce poured over it. The name is generally taken to signal modesty rather than any particular place, as with cottage cheese or cottage pie, and it suits household cookbooks because it uses one egg, a cup of milk and no fruit, spirits or costly spice. The cake was understood as a vehicle and the sauce as the part that gave it character, and the same sort of batter reappears through the period under lemon, vanilla, hard or hot butter sauce. The cream of tartar and soda pairing is also characteristic: separate leavening tins remained in use in home kitchens after commercial baking powder became available.