Recipe: Cherry Pudding

This recipe was requested by some readers of our most recent newsletter.

This is a very old-fashioned recipe that is not a pudding or even a pudding cake, but more like a heavy, porous coffee cake designed to be served with milk or half and half poured over it. It is probably a Mennonite recipe, because my Grandmother had never written it down before she let me transcribe what she did when making it — which would suggest that it was probably handed down by word of mouth in her family. And she was a Landis whose family had migrated down the Shenandoah Valley from Pennsylvania.

It is my very favorite sour-cherry dessert, and I could hardly wait each summer for the cherries to come in knowing it would be the first thing she would make. I never even poured the cream over it; I just ate it plain and still do.

• 3 Tablespoons butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 pint or more sour cherries, pitted
• 1½ cups milk
• 3 cups flour sifted with:
  • 3 level teaspoons baking powder and
  • A pinch of salt — about ½ teaspoon

Cream butter, sugar and eggs. Add dry ingredients and milk alternately. Fold in berries. Pour into 9-inch Pyrex baking dish and bake at 375 degrees for 35–40 minutes or until lightly browned on top and dry in the middle when tested with a wooden skewer.

Serve for breakfast or as a dessert with milk, cream or half and half poured over it. Serves 6–9.