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Bread and Fruit Pudding (Old Country Favourite)
Cut bread in slices of about ½ inch thick, remove the crust and line a pudding basin with the slices. Then place therein a layer of fresh fruit (blackberry, raspberry, currant, plum or other juicy fruit). Sprinkle over a little sugar, and place a slice of bread over alternating layers of fruit and bread sufficient to fill the basin.
Tie up in a cloth and boil as usual. Makes an excellent dish served up cold with a coating of whipped white of egg and castor sugar.
The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a cloth-tied basin pudding works, so the two things to pin down are the boiling and the bread.
- "Boil as usual"Butter a 1½-quart (1.5 L) pudding basin, fill it, cover the top with a doubled floured cloth tied under the rim, and set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching two-thirds up the basin. Keep it at a steady simmer for about 1½ to 2 hours, topping up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- Steaming works betterA cloth tie is fussy and lets water creep in. Pleated parchment plus foil, or a lidded plastic pudding basin, gives the same result with less risk of a soggy crown.
- The bread matters mostUse a firm, slightly stale white loaf with real structure. Soft modern sandwich bread dissolves into paste and the pudding will not hold its shape when turned out.
- Line it tightlyCut the slices as wedges and overlap the seams so no gaps show. Juice escaping through a gap can weaken the shell and make the pudding sag on unmoulding.
- Fruit and sugar quantitiesThe recipe gives none. Reckon on about 1½ lb (700 g) of juicy soft fruit and 4 to 6 oz (about ⅔ to 1 cup) sugar in total, more for currants or sour plums, less for ripe raspberries.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, finer than granulated but not powdered. Granulated sugar pulsed briefly in a blender is a fair substitute.
- The raw egg-white toppingWhipped raw white spread on a cold pudding is never cooked at any point. Use pasteurized egg white if you want the original effect, or finish with whipped cream instead.
- Chill before turning outCool in the basin, then refrigerate several hours or overnight with a weighted saucer on top. Chilling and light compression help it hold its shape when unmoulded.
- YieldA 1½-quart basin serves six to eight, cut in wedges like a cake.
This is the boiled cousin of what English cooks call summer pudding, and the parenthetical "Old Country Favourite" in the title is doing the real work: the Five Roses book was issued by a Canadian flour milling company for Canadian households, many of them one or two generations removed from Britain, and a label of this kind signals home cooking of the sort a reader's mother or grandmother had made. Bread-lined fruit puddings belong to a long tradition of thrift baking in which stale loaf does the job of pastry or batter. Uncooked versions, in which the basin is simply filled with hot fruit and left to soak and set overnight, are generally said to have come later and largely displaced the boiled form; the boiled version here gives a softer, more unified pudding with a distinctly steamed flavour. The whipped white of egg dusted with caster sugar is a period finish that turns up on all kinds of cold sweets in books of this era, before refrigeration made whipped cream a reliable everyday option.