Cottage Pudding

This is another recipe from the 1910 Economy Cookbook. I'm really intrigued with the concept of old-fashioned steamed or baked puddings. So this is another pudding recipe. Remember the fiasco with the Woodford Pudding? Don't worry, this one came out much prettier!

Cottage Pudding
Take 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk, 3 tablespoons melted butter, 1 egg, 2 teaspoons baking powder sifted with 2 1/2 cups flour. Bake and serve with liquid sauce.

After mixing all the ingredients (I used part wheat flour in addition to all-purpose), I chose to bake this pudding in a shallow pan, rather than the deep casserole dish I used last time. So I greased a 9x13 pan and spread the batter in that. Searching the internet for other examples of baked puddings, I found that 350 degrees seemed to be a good baking temperature. Baking times ranged from half an hour to 3 or 4 hours. I set the timer for 30 minutes and decided to just check it with a toothpick at that point and go from there. The toothpick came out clean the first time.

So baked in a 9x13 pan at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, the pudding was done! I let it cool a bit while I prepared the "liquid sauce."

I looked at all the various sauces given for the puddings in the Economy Cookbook just to get a feel for what a basic liquid sauce would be. Most of the pudding recipes just said to serve with sauce or with cream, but recipes that included sauce called for things like sugar, butter, flour, and water or milk. I remembered seeing a good sauce that was very similar to these on the Taste of Home website, so I used that recipe. I liked that I didn't have to interpret the directions to modern day English!

Hard Sauce (hard sauce is what this kind of cake-or-pudding sauce is called these days!)
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Dash ground allspice
1 cup cold water
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

In a small saucepan, combine the sugar, flour, nutmeg, allspice and water until smooth. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes or until thickened. Remove from the heat; stir in butter and extract. This can be served over pudding or spice cake.


This pudding was quite a bit easier on me emotionally than the Woodford pudding - it didn't give me any problems with abnormal growth and spillage. Still, I think I preferred the flavor of the Woodford. This one was good, but it wasn't quite as moist (it was rather cake-like) and seemed to be missing something flavor-wise. Perhaps I overcooked it - maybe it would be better checked after 20 minutes of cooking instead of 30. Even so, I consider this a successful delve into the cuisine of the early 20th century.