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Bread Pudding
4 cups bread cut in dice, 3 tablespoons sultanas, 2 tablespoons chopped candied peel, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon Crisco, rind of 1 lemon, 2 eggs, 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 cup milk, and 4 lumps of sugar. Put lump sugar in dry saucepan and heat until it turns dark brown. Add milk and stir it over fire until sugar dissolves. Mix bread, cleaned sultanas, chopped peel, sugar, Crisco, grated lemon rind, and colored milk. Beat up eggs and add them with lemon juice. Let mixture stand for 1/2 an hour, or longer, if bread is stale. Have ready Criscoed mold, put in mixture, cover top with piece of Criscoed paper, and steam it for 2 hours. Turn carefully on to hot dish and serve with it any good sweet sauce.
A steamed bread pudding from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, sweetened partly with burnt sugar for color and a faint bitterness. Nothing here is difficult, but the caramel step and the steaming both reward attention.
- The hinge: the burnt sugarThe four lumps are melted dry and taken to dark brown, then let down with the milk — this is caramel coloring, not extra sweetness. Take it just past amber; if it goes black and acrid the whole pudding tastes of it. Adding cold milk to hot caramel will spit and seize, so pour slowly and keep stirring over low heat until the hardened sugar redissolves.
- Lumps of sugarRead "4 lumps" as roughly 4 teaspoons of sugar; lump sugar was cut from the loaf and sizes varied. Precision does not matter much; it is there for color.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it. One tablespoon of any solid fat works; butter is better here for flavor, and it also does the job of greasing the mold and the paper.
- Sultanas and candied peelSultanas are golden raisins. "Cleaned" means rinsed and picked over for stems, a step modern packaged fruit does not need. Candied peel is still sold at holidays; mixed citrus peel is the intended thing.
- The soakHalf an hour is a minimum; the recipe itself says longer if the bread is stale, since dry bread takes more time to absorb. It should be genuinely saturated before it goes in the mold or you get dry pockets in the middle.
- Steaming setupUse a 1½- to 2-quart pudding basin or any heatproof bowl, greased, filled no more than three-quarters. Cover with greased paper (add foil over it, pleated, to keep condensation out), set on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water halfway up the sides, lid on, and keep it at a bare simmer. Check the water at the hour mark and top up with boiling water.
- Doneness and unmoldingAfter two hours the pudding should be set and springy; a skewer comes out clean. Let it rest 5-10 minutes before turning out or it may slump.
- Yield and sauceServes 4 to 6. "Any good sweet sauce" of the period would typically be a thin custard, a lemon sauce, or a hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the cookbook issued by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and books like this one put it into recipes where butter, lard or suet had always stood — hence the single tablespoon of shortening in a pudding that in an English kitchen would have carried suet. The dish itself is much older than the book: steamed puddings of stale bread, dried fruit and candied peel were a standard way of using up the loaf, cooked in a basin over water — a practice often explained by the unreliability of domestic ovens, though that account is more tradition than documented cause. The burnt-sugar milk is a domestic version of the caramel coloring used commercially to give puddings and cakes the dark look associated with richer, longer-boiled Christmas puddings.