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BREAD-CRUMBS FOR PASTRY
Many puddings that are commonly baked in a crust, such as cocoa-nut, potato, apple, and lemon, are equally as good and more wholesome, made by strewing grated bread-crumbs over a buttered pie-plate or pudding-dish to the usual depth of crust; pour in the pudding, strew another layer of bread-crumbs over the top, and bake.
This is a method rather than a measured recipe: a way to bake soft custard-style pie fillings without making pastry. A few details need translating.
- What "pudding" means hereThe puddings named — cocoa-nut, potato, apple, lemon — appear to be soft, pourable mixtures of the kind that would otherwise be poured into a pie shell. The method suits a wet, pourable filling; a dry or chunky one gives the crumb layer nothing to bind it.
- The crumbs"Grated" bread-crumbs implies dried or stale bread rubbed on a grater: coarser and drier than fine commercial crumb. Fresh soft crumbs absorb liquid and turn to paste, so dry the bread out in a low oven first.
- Butter the dish properlyThis is the hinge. The crumbs are held to the dish by butter alone, so the plate needs a thick, even coat right to the rim, and the crumbs pressed in. A thin smear and the bottom layer floats up into the filling.
- "The usual depth of crust"The recipe gives no measurement; read it as roughly the thickness of rolled pie pastry, about an eighth of an inch.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven temperature. Custard-type fillings of this period were baked moderate rather than hot — in modern terms somewhere around 325–350F. Unlike pastry, the filling needs no hot start, so it can bake from the beginning at the temperature it wants.
- Timing and donenessThe recipe gives no time. A pie-plate of custard filling will want something in the region of 35 to 50 minutes depending on the filling. Judge by the centre: just set with a slight wobble, not firm, since it goes on cooking out of the oven.
- The top layerThe recipe strews the second layer of crumbs on before baking. If they sink into a very wet filling, adding them once the surface has begun to set will keep them on top; a little butter dotted over helps them brown.
- YieldThe proportions come from whichever pudding recipe you use. One standard pie-plate serves six to eight.
Stale bread was among the most reliable scraps in a nineteenth-century kitchen, a byproduct of households that baked their own loaves. The claim that a crumb lining is "more wholesome" than pastry reflects a widespread Victorian suspicion of rich short crusts, which were held to be indigestible; dyspepsia was a constant preoccupation of American domestic writers of the period, and lard- or butter-heavy pastry was a standard culprit. The technique itself is old and broad rather than particular to any one dish: buttered crumbs standing in for a crust is the same logic that produces a brown Betty or a charlotte, and it saved the cook both the fat and the labour of rolling and fitting a shell.