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German Pudding, Brown Bread
Collect as many pieces of stale brown bread as will make half a pound of crumbs, and rub them through a sieve, then soak for half an hour in a wine-glassful of sherry or boiling milk, and mix with it two ounces of fresh butter, three table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar, two ounces of sweet almonds, blanched and pounded, a tea-spoonful of finely-chopped lemon-rind, half a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon, two table-spoonfuls of picked raisins, the same of currants, and the well-beaten yolks of six eggs. When these ingredients are thoroughly blended, butter a mould, add to the above-mentioned ingredients the whites of the eggs, beaten to a firm froth, pour the mixture into the mould, and boil or steam the pudding. When sufficiently cooked, turn it out, and serve with wine or German pudding sauce (see GERMAN PUDDING SAUCE). Time to boil, an hour and a half. Probable cost, 1s. 2d., exclusive of the wine and sauce. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian steamed crumb pudding of the German Brotpudding type, and it behaves well as written provided the mould is only two-thirds filled and the water never stops simmering.
- "Brown bread" hereThis means British wholemeal or a coarse brown loaf, not the molasses-and-cornmeal Boston brown bread. A dense wholemeal or a rye-wheat loaf, stale and dried, gives the nutty flavour the pudding depends on; fresh soft bread will turn the mixture pasty.
- A wine-glassfulRoughly 2 fl oz, a quarter of a cup. That is the only liquid added beyond the eggs and butter, so the crumbs should be damp rather than wet.
- Sifted sugarCaster or superfine sugar, sifted to break lumps. Three tablespoons is a modest sweetness by modern standards, which suits the wine sauce served alongside.
- Sweet almondsSimply ordinary almonds, so named to distinguish them from bitter almonds, which were sold in Victorian groceries and are not safe in quantity. Blanch, dry and pound or pulse them coarsely; ready-ground almonds will do but lose the texture.
- Folding the whitesThe hinge of the recipe. Beat the whites to a firm but not dry froth and fold them in last, in two additions, cutting through rather than stirring. This is the only lift the pudding gets, and a deflated batter steams to a heavy brick.
- The mouldA 1.5-litre (about 6 cup) pudding basin or charlotte mould, well buttered and filled no more than two-thirds. Cover with buttered baking parchment and foil, pleated across the middle, and tie down.
- Boiling and steamingStand the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a pan, with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full hour and a half, topping up with boiling water. The centre should read about 85C (185F) and a skewer come out clean.
- Turning out and yieldRest the pudding five to ten minutes before unmoulding, or it may crack. Serves five or six, as the original says; the "probable cost, 1s. 2d." is period pricing and no guide to anything now.
Steamed puddings built on stale bread were the thrifty backbone of the nineteenth-century sweet course, and the German label is probably owed to the pattern of Brotpudding and its richer relative Brottorte so often made with dark rye or wholemeal crumbs, almonds, cinnamon, lemon peel, dried fruit and a generous count of eggs, the whites whipped in to lighten a mixture that would otherwise be leaden. The 'probable cost' and 'sufficient for' formulas, together with the cross-reference, are hallmarks of the Cassell's dictionary-of-cookery format though the page alone does not settle which of them it comes from, the Dictionary of Cookery of the 1870s and the later New Dictionary being different books which gathered such continental dishes alongside British ones and cross-referenced them, hence the instruction to look up German pudding sauce separately. The habit of pricing each dish, here 1s. 2d. for five or six people, tells you as much about the book's readership as the recipe does: a cook was expected to account for the housekeeping money, and a pudding that turned a heel of stale bread and six eggs into a company dessert was exactly the kind of economy the book was selling.