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A Plain Pudding for Children
Butter slices of bread on both sides, place them in a hot skillet containing about two-thirds of a cup of molasses or syrup; when the molasses has boiled up once, place the buttered bread in the skillet and brown nicely on both sides.
A skillet pudding in name only — this is buttered bread fried in boiling molasses, closer to a caramelised French toast without the egg. The whole thing takes under ten minutes and the sugar is the only thing that can go wrong.
- Watch the molasses, not the breadMolasses at a hard boil climbs past caramel and into burnt very quickly, and burnt molasses is acrid rather than merely dark. Keep the pan at medium, let it bubble up once as directed, then get the bread in immediately.
- Two-thirds of a cup is a lotThat quantity of syrup will coat roughly four to six slices generously. For two slices, a quarter cup in a small skillet is enough to keep the pan from scorching dry.
- BreadUse a sturdy sandwich loaf cut thick, a day or two old; airy modern bread collapses into the syrup.
- SkilletCast iron would be a usual pan of the period and it handles sugar well. Avoid a thin nonstick pan — the sugar will run hot in patches before you notice.
- Buttered on both sidesThe butter is not incidental. It keeps the bread from welding to the pan, so do not skip it or reduce it.
- ServingServe hot and straight from the pan; the coating sets tacky and then hard as it cools. Cream, milk, or a spoonful of plain yoghurt cuts the sweetness, which is considerable.
- Molasses or syrupBlackstrap is too bitter here. Use ordinary unsulphured molasses, cane syrup, sorghum, or golden syrup — the sort of syrup called 'treacle' in Britain, or, in American usage, 'long sweetening.'
Recipes with titles like "a plain pudding for children" can be found in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household manuals, where "plain" seems generally to have signalled cheap, quick, and free of eggs, spices, brandy or currants — the things that made a pudding company food. Molasses was a common working household's sweetener into the 1900s, sold by the gallon and for much of that period cheaper than refined sugar, though refined sugar prices fell sharply by the turn of the century and narrowed the gap; stale bread, by most accounts, was rarely wasted. Dishes of this kind sit alongside bread puddings, brown bettys and toast in cream in the same books: all of them ways of turning a hardening loaf into something a child would eat willingly at the end of a meal. The name "pudding" is doing loose work here, as it often did — in this period it covered nearly any sweet dish served at the close of dinner or supper, whether or not anything was steamed, baked, or set.