Take 1 quart of black cherries; remove the stones and mix with ½ pound of fine bread-crumbs, some chopped nuts, the beaten yolks of 4 eggs and ½ cup of sugar. Add the whites beaten stiff. Bake in a well-buttered pudding-dish and serve cold.
A crumb-and-fruit pudding of the simplest kind: no flour, no butter in the batter, no liquid beyond the eggs and the juice the cherries give up. The original leaves out the oven temperature and the baking time, so both need supplying.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. In a buttered 8-inch or 2-quart dish it needs roughly 45 to 55 minutes, until set in the centre and lightly browned. It will sink a little as it cools, which is expected.
- A quart of cherriesMeasured whole and unpitted, that is about 1½ lb, giving roughly 1¼ lb once stoned. Frozen dark sweet cherries, thawed and drained well, work; drain them properly or the pudding weeps.
- Black cherriesThese are dark sweet cherries of the Bing sort, not sour pie cherries. If you use sour cherries, the half cup of sugar will not be enough.
- Half a pound of bread-crumbs"Fine bread-crumbs" here most likely means fresh soft crumbs from the inside of a stale loaf rather than dry commercial crumbs. Half a pound is about 4 cups loosely packed fresh; dried crumbs of the same weight would give a tight, sandy pudding.
- The nutsUnspecified. Almonds or hazelnuts suit the cherries; about 1/2 cup chopped is a reasonable proportion against this quantity of fruit.
- Folding the whitesThis is the only lift the pudding gets. Beat the whites to soft-firm peaks and fold them in last, in two additions, working just until no streaks remain. Overworked whites give a heavy, damp pudding.
- Buttering the dish"Well-buttered" is meant seriously — the cherry juice caramelises against the sides. Butter generously and dust with a spoonful of crumbs or sugar if you intend to turn it out.
- ServingServed cold, as directed, it firms into something sliceable. Cream, a plain custard sauce or lightly sweetened whipped cream all suit it. Serves six to eight.
Books of this kind — a dish a day, each pinned to a country — were a popular novelty format around the turn of the twentieth century, and the national labels are often looser than they look. What may make this pudding "Scotch" is not the cherries but the method: a baked or steamed pudding built on breadcrumbs rather than flour, bound with eggs and studded with fruit, is a long-standing habit of British and Scottish kitchens, where stale bread was too useful to waste and puddings were the ordinary end of a meal. The nearest domestic relatives are the crumb-thickened fruit puddings and the cloth-boiled clootie dumpling, though this version is lighter than either, closer to a soufflé pudding in construction. Compilers of all-nations calendars may well have drawn on such family resemblances rather than on any documented regional original, so the name is probably best read as a signal of style rather than a claim of provenance.