Soak ½ loaf of bread and press dry. Mix with ½ pound of chopped suet; add a teaspoonful of salt, 1 cup of sugar, 2 eggs and the grated peel of a lemon, a pinch of cinnamon, cloves and allspice. Add some sifted flour; mix well, and form into a large ball. Then peel 1 quart of pears. Cut in half, and lay in a large saucepan a layer of pears; sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon and grated lemon peel. Lay in the pudding; cover with a layer of pears and pour over all 3 tablespoonfuls of syrup. Fill with cold water and boil half an hour; then bake three hours and serve hot.
A German-style bread-and-suet dumpling poached and then baked in a bed of pears. The proportions are given loosely even by 1900 standards, so a few judgement calls are needed before you start.
- The hinge: keep it coveredThe dumpling is a large ball of soaked bread and suet sitting in water; it holds together only while it stays moist. Use a lidded, oven-safe pot for both stages, and keep enough liquid in it that the pears never go dry.
- "½ loaf of bread"Loaf sizes varied, so this is a judgement call; if the loaf is taken as about a pound, roughly 8 oz of stale white bread, crusts on, soaked in water or milk and squeezed hard, is the intended quantity.
- SuetBeef suet, chopped fine or grated from the hard block; packaged shredded suet works directly. Butter is not the same thing here, since suet melts later and gives the pudding its open, springy crumb rather than a greasy one.
- "Some sifted flour"Add it a few spoonfuls at a time until the mass just holds a ball without slumping, probably 3/4 to 1 1/2 cups depending on how wet the bread was. Too much flour and you get a bread brick; the dough should be tacky, not stiff.
- A quart of pearsMeasured by volume after peeling and halving, this comes to somewhere around 1½ lb, roughly four to six medium pears. Firm cooking pears such as Bosc hold their shape over the long heat; ripe Bartletts will collapse into sauce, which is not a disaster but changes the dish.
- "3 tablespoonfuls of syrup"The kind is unspecified. Any sweet syrup will serve: golden syrup, molasses, or the syrup drained from bottled fruit. Molasses will darken the pears noticeably.
- Oven heat and the three hoursNo temperature is given; the book leaves the oven to the cook. A slow oven, 300-325F, covered, works here, and check well before the full three hours, which at a modern setting risks drying the dumpling out.
- Yield and servingCut the ball into wedges, spoon the pears and their syrup over each, and serve hot; cream or a vanilla custard sauce suits it.
This belongs to the broad south German family of bread-and-fruit puddings -- compare Ofenschlupfer, a baked pudding of stale bread and fruit: a frugal dumpling of stale bread, suet and spice, cooked in and under fruit so the fruit does the flavouring and the bread does the filling. Boiled suet puddings were common ground between German and English kitchens in the nineteenth century, which is one reason a dish like this reads as familiar to Anglo-American cooks. Cooking pears were widely grown and kept in southern Germany, often dried or held in syrup for winter, and a January date in a year-of-dishes book suits a household reaching for preserved fruit and a heel of stale bread. Books of this type, arranging one dish per day and tagging each with a nation, were a popular novelty format around the turn of the twentieth century, selling variety to home cooks rather than authenticity.