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Bread Pudding with Cherries
Soak 1/2 pound bread in cold water till soft. Press out water and beat out any lumps with fork. Add 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, and 1/4 pound glace cherries and 1 teaspoon baking powder. Mix well, and add 1 well-beaten egg and 3 tablespoons milk. Put into Criscoed basin and cover with Criscoed paper, and steam for 1 1/2 hours.
A thrifty steamed pudding built on stale bread rather than flour, from one of the Crisco-sponsored menu books. The technique is straightforward, but the vessel and the covering need translating.
- The breadHalf a pound is roughly 8 ounces, or about eight slices of a standard sandwich loaf. Use stale, dryish bread with the crusts on; fresh, soft bread turns to paste and the pudding will be heavy.
- Wring it properlyThis is the hinge. After soaking, squeeze the bread hard between your palms until it stops dripping, then break it up with a fork until no lumps remain. Excess water is the difference between a light pudding and a sodden one.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and 2 tablespoons of softened butter gives better flavour with no change in structure.
- "Criscoed basin"A basin is a British-style pudding bowl, deep and round; something in the region of 1.5 pints to 1 quart suits this quantity, leaving room to rise. Grease it thoroughly. A heatproof pudding basin, a small metal bowl, or a 1-quart pudding mould all serve.
- "Criscoed paper"Greased parchment, tied down with string, with a pleat folded across the middle so the pudding can rise. A layer of foil over the top helps keep steam out of the mixture.
- SteamingSet the covered basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover the pan and keep it at a bare simmer. Check the water level at the hour mark and top up with boiling water; 1½ hours is right, and the pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean.
- Glacé cherriesGlace cherries -- A quarter pound is about half to two-thirds of a cup. Rinse off the syrup and dry them, then toss them with a little of the bread mixture so they do not all sink to the bottom.
- Yield and servingFour to six small servings. Turn it out while hot and serve with custard, a thin vanilla sauce, or lightly sweetened cream; steamed puddings stiffen quickly as they cool.
Steamed bread puddings of this kind belong to a long British tradition of using up stale loaf ends in a basin over the pot, and they crossed into American cookbooks largely through that lineage — the "basin" is a giveaway of the English pudding tradition. What marks this version as early twentieth-century American is Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911 and promoted through a series of recipe booklets and menu calendars in which the product is named insistently, even as a verb. Glacé cherries, cheap and shelf-stable, are often said to have been a festive fleck in such puddings before fresh fruit was reliably available out of season.