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Poor Curate's Pudding
Grease a pie-dish, cut some stalks of rhubarb into small pieces and lay them in the dish; strew thickly with moist sugar, some thin strips of lemon-rind and a few drops of the juice. Over this strew a thick layer of bits of broken-up bread and scraps of butter; continue in the same way until the dish is full, spreading on the top a thick layer of sugar and some bits of butter. Bake for an hour and a half, and then stand in front of the fire to brown. Slices of bread and butter may be used instead of bread scraps if preferred.
A layered rhubarb and bread pudding built with whatever bread the household had left over. The recipe gives no quantities at all, so the proportions are yours to judge; what matters is that the sugar is generous and the bread is genuinely buttered.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven setting; an hour and a half of baking points to a moderate oven, and 325-350F suits it. At that heat the rhubarb collapses into syrup and the lower bread soaks it up without the top burning before the fruit is done.
- Browning without a fireStanding the dish in front of the fire was how a Victorian cook crisped a top after a long slow bake. Use the broiler for two or three minutes, watching it, as the sugar and butter on top will colour fast and then blacken.
- Moist sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined soft sugar, brown and slightly damp; light brown or soft dark brown sugar is the direct equivalent. Granulated white works but gives a thinner, less caramel-flavoured syrup.
- Quantities to work fromThe recipe gives none, so these are a suggestion only. For a 2 1/2 to 3 pint pie-dish, roughly 1 1/2 lb trimmed rhubarb, 6-8 oz soft brown sugar, 6 oz bread and 3 oz butter fills it in three or four layers. It serves four to six warm, with cream or custard.
- Rhubarb leavesUse only the stalks, as the recipe specifies. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food; cut them off and discard them.
- The breadStale, close-crumbed white bread is what this wants. Modern soft sandwich bread turns to paste in the syrup, so use a day-old loaf, and butter the pieces properly rather than dotting them, since the butter is what keeps the layers from merging into one mass.
- Juice and lemonRhubarb throws a great deal of liquid. Do not add water, and set the dish on a baking sheet in case it bubbles over. The thin strips of lemon-rind are meant to be lifted out or eaten around; pared zest without pith is best.
The name belongs to a whole Victorian family of dishes labelled for the poverty of the clergy and the schoolroom — poor man's pudding, poor knights of Windsor, curate's pudding — in which stale bread and butter stand in for pastry, suet or sponge. A country curate was a byword in nineteenth-century England for respectable near-destitution, and a pudding named for him promised something that tasted better than its cost. Rhubarb suited that purpose exactly: as the century went on, forced rhubarb from the Yorkshire growing district became steadily cheaper and more plentiful in spring, arriving well before the orchard fruits and needing only sugar, which had also fallen sharply in price after the mid-century duty reductions. The finishing instruction to stand the dish before the fire is a reminder that the coal range's oven browned poorly from above, and the recipe's own direction shows that the open grate could serve as a broiler.