Chop ½ cup of suet. Mix with ½ loaf of stale bread that has been soaked and pressed dry. Add 1 cup of chopped apples, 1 cup of sugar, ½ cup of chopped raisins and nuts. Sprinkle with cinnamon, nutmeg and grated lemon peel; then mix with the yolks of 4 eggs and the whites beaten stiff. Put in a well-buttered pudding-dish, and let bake until done. Serve hot with wine sauce.
A bread-and-suet pudding of the kind that used up a stale loaf, with the eggs whipped separately to lift it. The original gives neither temperature nor time, so the two things worth pinning down are the oven and the doneness test.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither temperature nor time. A moderate oven, around 350F, for 45 to 60 minutes in a deep dish is a reasonable modern reading. It is done when the centre is set and a knife comes out clean; the top should be browned but not dry.
- The hinge: fold the whites in lastThe yolks go in with the fruit mixture, but the stiff whites should be folded in at the very end, in two or three additions, and the pudding put straight into the oven. Stirred in, they deflate and you get a dense soaked loaf instead of a risen pudding.
- SuetHalf a cup of beef suet, finely chopped or grated, and cold when it goes in. Ask a butcher for kidney suet, or use shredded packaged suet; half a cup is roughly 3 oz. Cold unsalted butter, grated, works if suet is unavailable, though the texture is softer.
- "Half a loaf of stale bread"Genuinely ambiguous, as loaf sizes varied. Aim for about 8 oz of stale white bread, some 6 to 8 thick slices, soaked in water or milk and then squeezed hard. Press it properly dry or the pudding will not set.
- SugarA full cup on top of a cup of apples and half a cup of raisins is sweet by current taste. Two-thirds of a cup is closer to a modern dessert, particularly if the apples are eating apples rather than sharp cooking varieties.
- Wine sauceCommonly butter, sugar and a beaten egg or a starch thickening let down with sherry or Madeira, warmed but never boiled. Any warm custard or hard sauce serves the same purpose.
- YieldFills a 2-quart baking dish and serves six to eight. It must be served hot; reheated portions are best covered and warmed at 325F.
The heading is confused in the original — the running title calls it a bread pudding, the entry itself "Hungarian Chop" — but the construction is clear enough: stale bread, suet, dried and fresh fruit, and separated eggs, a formula found across Central Europe under names like Zsemlyefelfújt or the Austrian and German Semmelauflauf, a soaked-roll soufflé pudding. Books of this sort, organised as a dish for every day of the year, leaned on national labels as a novelty rather than taking their recipes from any Hungarian source. What is authentic here is the technique. Suet puddings and bread puddings were the standard way of turning a stale loaf into a dinner course, and beating the whites separately was how a cook lightened something that would otherwise be heavy.