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Bread Plum Pudding
Cut half a loaf of dry wheat bread into slices in a deep dish and pour over it a pint of milk and water, equal parts, let it stand until perfectly soft, then mash it up finely and add a piece of butter as large as an egg, half a pint of coffee sugar, three eggs well beaten, the grated peel and juice of a large lemon or orange; stir in a tea-cup of stoned and chopped raisins, one cup of currants well washed and one cup of citron cut in thin pieces; one wine glass of wine may be added although it is not necessary. Steam it one and one-half hours. Serve with a rich sauce, cold or hot.
A frugal steamed pudding built on stale bread rather than suet and flour. The measurements are all nineteenth-century household units, and the recipe assumes you know how to rig a steamer, which it never mentions.
- Half a loaf of dry breadRoughly 8 to 12 oz of stale white bread, crusts and all, depending on the loaf. Genuinely dry bread is the point: fresh bread turns to paste and the pudding sets heavy.
- Coffee sugarA coarse-grained granulated sugar sold for sweetening coffee. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; half a pint by volume is about 1 cup.
- Butter as large as an eggThe standard period shorthand for about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Soften it so it works into the warm bread mash rather than sitting in lumps.
- Tea-cup and wine glassA tea-cup here is smaller than a modern 8 oz measuring cup; period equivalences run from about 4 to 6 fl oz. A wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so the optional wine is a modest splash.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced in the baking aisle around the winter holidays. Mixed candied peel is a workable stand-in; the flavour is milder.
- The vesselButter a 1 1/2 to 2 quart pudding basin or mold, fill it no more than three-quarters full, and cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil tied down. Without a seal, condensation waterlogs the top.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, cover, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full hour and a half. Top up with boiling water as it drops; letting the pot run dry will scorch the base.
- Testing and turning outA skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy rather than liquid. Rest it 10 minutes before inverting so it firms enough to hold its shape.
- Yield and sauceServes 6 to 8. The "rich sauce" of the period means a hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar, or a warm custard or thin lemon sauce; either suits the citrus in the pudding.
Steamed puddings of this type sit at the thrifty end of a long family of English boiled and steamed puddings, and the name is telling: it is a plum pudding in structure and spirit, but the flour and suet have been replaced by yesterday's loaf. "Plum" in this context has long meant dried fruit generally, so a plum pudding with no plums in it was unremarkable to a nineteenth-century reader. Recipes like this one presumably earned their place in American household books because they solved two problems at once: they used up stale bread, which no careful kitchen threw away, and they produced a festive-looking dish from cheap staples, with the wine marked optional and the expensive citron the only real indulgence. Steaming rather than baking also kept the pudding moist and spared the cook a long spell of oven heat, which mattered when the oven was part of a wood- or coal-fired range.