Home › The Principles of Cookery › Bread, Brown, Pudding
Bread, Brown, Pudding
Take equal quantities of well-washed currants, brown bread-crumbs, and shredded suet-half a pound of each--add six ounces of sugar, half a glass of brandy, and the same quantity of cream; mix all together, with six eggs well beaten, leaving out the whites of two. Bake in a moderate oven for two hours. Serve with sweet sauce and sugar over the top. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A baked suet-and-breadcrumb pudding of the plainest Victorian kind, closer to a light Christmas pudding than to a cake. The one thing to get right is heat: two hours at a true moderate oven only works if the pudding is protected from drying, so bake it covered or in a water bath.
- Quantities in plain termsHalf a pound each of currants, crumbs and suet is 8 oz (225 g) apiece; six ounces of sugar is roughly 3/4 to 1 cup. The whole mixture will fill something in the region of a 2-quart dish.
- A glass of brandyThe recipe asks for half a glass, not a whole one. A Victorian wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so roughly 1 fl oz of brandy and the same again of cream. The measure is genuinely loose in the original, and a little more of either will do no harm.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 325-350F (160-175C); the original gives no temperature. Cover the dish with foil or a buttered paper for most of the baking so the top does not set hard before the centre cooks; a roasting tin of hot water underneath keeps it tender. It is done when a skewer comes out clean.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. Nineteenth-century currants arrived gritty and stalky, which is why the recipe insists on well-washed; modern packaged fruit needs no more than a rinse, and should be dried before mixing.
- Brown bread-crumbsCrumbs from a wholemeal loaf, slightly stale rather than oven-dried. Commercial dried breadcrumbs are too fine and too thirsty and will give a pasty result.
- SuetShredded beef suet from a butcher, or packaged shredded suet where sold. Frozen butter grated coarsely is the usual substitute; it melts sooner, so keep the mixture cold until it goes into the oven.
- The eggsSix eggs less two whites, at a period when eggs ran smaller than today. The omitted whites are the point -- they would toughen the crumb.
- Sweet sauceRead this as a pouring custard or a brandy-and-butter sauce; the phrase is unspecific in the original. Sugar over the top means a dusting just before serving, not a glaze.
- YieldFive or six as written, though it is rich enough to stretch further. It reheats well, steamed or covered in a low oven.
Brown bread puddings belong to the large family of English suet puddings in which breadcrumbs stand in for flour, a substitution that gives a lighter, slightly nutty crumb and made good use of stale loaves in a household that baked or bought bread daily. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the late nineteenth century as an A-to-Z reference rather than a narrative cookbook, prints a number of such puddings side by side under "Bread" o, with and without fruit \, precifruit \, precisely because they were the everyday sweet course of middle-class dinners, cheap in ingredients and forgiving of a cook's inattention. The costing of 2s. is characteristic of the book's audience: a mistress ordering from a kitchen she did not work in wanted to know what a dish should come to. The brandy and cream mark this as the better-off end of the range; plainer versions of the same pudding were presumably made with milk and little or no spirit.