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Cherry Pudding, Baked
Wash and stone the cherries, put a layer of them at the bottom of a well-buttered pie-dish, and strew over this a little sifted sugar and a small quantity of finely-chopped lemon-rind; lay over these some thin bread and butter, and repeat the layers until the dish is full, finishing with cherries strewn over with sugar; pour a large cupful of water over the whole, and bake in a good oven. This pudding may be made with dried or preserved cherries, when, instead of water, a little custard may be used to moisten the bread. The kernels of the cherries, too, may be blanched and sliced, and used instead of lemon-rind. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost of cherries, 3d. to 6d. per pound. A pudding made with two pounds of cherries will serve for five or six persons.
A layered bread-and-butter pudding built on fresh cherries, from the era when a summer glut of fruit had to be used within days. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the oven need translating.
- "A good oven"Best read as a moderately hot oven, somewhere around 350-400F (180-200C); the book gives no temperatures, so any figure is an approximation. Hot enough to crisp the top layer of buttered bread and set the fruit juices in the three-quarters of an hour given, without the cherries collapsing to jam.
- Sifted sugarCaster or superfine sugar, sifted to break up lumps, not confectioners' sugar. Granulated works but dissolves more slowly between the layers.
- The bread and butterThin slices, buttered on one side, crusts left on or off as you prefer. Slightly stale bread is better than fresh; it absorbs the cherry juice without turning to paste.
- A large cupful of waterRoughly 8-10 fl oz. It looks like too little for a full dish, but the cherries release a great deal of liquid as they heat. Do not add more, or the lower layers will be soup.
- Skip the kernelsThe recipe offers blanched, sliced cherry kernels in place of lemon rind, for a bitter-almond note. Cherry stones contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is broken, crushed or chewed; kernels of this sort turn up in a number of nineteenth-century recipes, but modern practice avoids them. Use the lemon rind, or a drop of almond extract.
- The dried or preserved variantIf you use dried or bottled cherries, custard takes the place of the water. The recipe asks only for "a little," enough to moisten the bread, so pour sparingly rather than flooding the dish; the dry fruit will drink some of it. No separate oven instruction is given for this version.
- Stoning the fruitTwo pounds of cherries is a long job by hand. A cherry pitter is worth the drawer space; failing that, a sturdy paper clip bent open lifts the stone cleanly.
- YieldAs stated, two pounds of cherries serves five or six. Use a deep pie dish of about two quarts and let the pudding stand ten minutes before serving, or the juice runs everywhere.
Cassell's places this among the household puddings that turned cheap seasonal fruit and yesterday's loaf into a hot dish for a family table - the same logic as bread-and-butter pudding, summer pudding and charlotte, all of which depend on bread as the structural element rather than pastry or batter. The quoted cost, threepence to sixpence a pound, marks cherries as a genuinely cheap midsummer commodity in late nineteenth-century Britain, when Kentish orchards sent fruit into London by rail in enormous quantities for a few weeks a year. The suggestion of blanched cherry kernels in place of lemon rind reflects a long-standing European habit of using stone-fruit kernels for their bitter-almond flavour, found also in ratafia, noyau and older custard recipes; the practice faded as the cyanogenic content of the kernels became better understood.