Soak ½ loaf of bread in water; then press it dry. Heat ½ cup of butter and mix with the bread; add 2 chopped apples, ½ cup of raisins, ½ cup of pounded almonds and the grated peel of a lemon. Add the yolks of 4 eggs and the whites beaten to a stiff froth; mix well together. Put in a buttered pudding-dish and pour over ½ cup of melted butter; let bake in a moderate oven until brown. Serve hot.
A sweet bread pudding in the Central European style, leavened only by beaten egg whites. The whole success of it lies in getting the water out of the bread and the air into the whites.
- How much bread"Half a loaf" is imprecise; figure roughly 8 ounces of stale white bread, crusts and all, soaked and then squeezed.
- Press it genuinely drySoak the bread until it collapses, then wring it in a clean towel until no more water runs. Wet bread gives a heavy, gluey kugel that will not rise on the egg whites.
- Moderate oven350F. Expect 45 to 60 minutes in a buttered 8-inch square or 2-quart dish, until the top is browned and the centre is set rather than wobbling.
- Pounded almondsBlanched almonds crushed in a mortar. Almond flour works, but a coarse pulse in a food processor is closer to the original texture; stop before it turns to paste.
- The butterA half cup mixed in and another half cup poured over is a full cup, two sticks. The poured butter is what browns and crisps the top, so do not skip it, but you may cut it to a quarter cup without harming the dish.
- Fold, do not stirBeat the whites separately to stiff peaks and fold them in last, after the yolks, fruit and nuts are already combined. "Mix well together" here means until just uniform.
- No sugar at allThe original relies on the apples and raisins. Use sweet eating apples, not tart cooking varieties, or add 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar with the yolks.
- YieldSix to eight servings as a dessert. Good warm with nothing on it; some serve it with sour cream.
Kugel is Yiddish, from the German for ball or sphere, and is often traced to the round earthenware pot the pudding was baked in, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. Kugels belong to Sabbath cooking, when nothing could be freshly cooked and dishes were set to bake slowly from Friday evening, and the form runs from savoury noodle and potato versions to sweet fruited ones like this. The book itself calls this only "Jewish"; a bread pudding with apples, raisins, almonds and lemon peel is the Central European sweet type, close kin to the Austrian and German Scheiterhaufen and to English bread pudding, and it reflects an economy in which stale bread was never thrown away. Its appearance in a book that assigns one national dish to each day of the year says something about how the compiler thought of Jewish cooking: as a cuisine of its own, listed alongside Turkish and English.