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Rhubarb and Bread Pudding
Butter a pie-dish thickly, and cover the bottom with a layer of bread-crumbs half an inch thick. Place upon this a layer of rhubarb washed and cut into one-inch lengths, and sprinkle some moist sugar over the fruit. Fill the dish with alternate layers of fruit and bread, and be careful that the sides of the dish are walled with bread-crumbs; let bread form the topmost layer. Lay three or four little pieces of butter here and there on the top of the pudding, and bake in a moderate oven. When time is a consideration the bread may be freed from crust, and laid in the pie-dish in thin slices without being crumbled. Time, half an hour to one hour, according to size. When the rhubarb is soft the pudding is done. Probable cost of rhubarb, 5d. to 8d. per bundle.
A layered fruit-and-crumb pudding of the plainest sort, written for cooks who kept stale bread on hand as a matter of course. The original gives no quantities at all, so the proportions below are the working ones.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (175C). The original's test for doneness is simply that the rhubarb is soft; a knife meeting no resistance is a practical way to check.
- QuantitiesFor a 1.5-quart pie dish, about 1.5 lb trimmed rhubarb, 4-5 oz sugar, and roughly 4 oz dry breadcrumbs, plus 2 oz butter in total. Scale to fill the dish; nothing here is delicate.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar, damp and slightly sticky. Light brown sugar is the closest current equivalent; white granulated works but gives a flatter flavour.
- Use stale breadFresh crumbs turn to paste in the rhubarb juice. Day-old or older bread, dried a little in the oven, keeps enough structure to stay distinct in layers.
- Sugar the fruit generouslyRhubarb of the kind sold now is often more acid than sweet forced spring stalks, and there is no flour or egg here to soften the effect. Taste a raw sliver and add sugar accordingly.
- Walling the dishThe recipe insists the sides be lined with crumbs, though it does not say why; the likely purpose is to soak up juice that would otherwise pool and boil over. Press it firmly into the buttered dish.
- TimingHalf an hour suits a shallow dish; a deep one needs closer to an hour. If the top browns before the fruit collapses, cover loosely with foil.
- The leavesOnly the stalks are used. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not eaten; trim and discard them.
- YieldServes four to six, warm, with cream or custard.
Rhubarb reached English kitchens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as fruit; the stalks only became a common dessert crop in the early nineteenth century, a shift often attributed to the falling price of sugar, which made their sharpness manageable, and forced Yorkshire rhubarb is generally said to have been reaching the spring market by the time Cassell's was compiled, though how established it was then is uncertain. Puddings built from buttered breadcrumbs and fruit belong to the same thrifty tradition as brown betty and charlotte -- ways of turning stale bread into a hot dish without pastry, suet or eggs, all of which cost more. The closing note on price, 5d. to 8d. a bundle, is typical of the book: it was written for households budgeting by the week, and rhubarb earned its place on those pages by being among the first and cheapest fruits of the year.