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Bread Sponge Pudding
2 eggs 1 cup currants (or raisins) 1 cup (small) brown sugar ½ teaspoon cinnamon 1 cup sour milk 1 teaspoon soda Bread sponge.
Reserve a small bowl of bread sponge after mixing it down in the morning.
When ready to make your pudding, chop the dough finely. Beat the eggs. Add all ingredients, also chopped dough. Beat together until smooth. Put in well-buttered dish, and steam.
A thrift pudding built on leftover bread dough, from the era when a sponge was set every morning and a cook simply set aside a bowlful. Everything hinges on getting a substitute for that sponge and on giving the pudding enough time in the steam.
- What "bread sponge" meansThe soft, risen batter-dough of a yeast bread, taken after the morning's first punching down and before shaping. The recipe says only "a small bowl," so the quantity is left to the cook; something on the order of a cup of slack white bread dough, risen once, is a reasonable reading. A piece of no-knead or ciabatta dough works, as does dough from a bread machine stopped after the first rise.
- Chopping the doughChopping the sticky dough finely with a wet knife, or snipping it with oiled scissors, is what lets it disperse. Left in lumps it steams into gummy pockets rather than dissolving into the batter.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here is naturally soured raw milk, not spoiled pasteurised milk. Use buttermilk, or a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes; the acid is what the teaspoon of soda needs to react with.
- "1 cup (small)" sugarMost likely a small or scant cup rather than a heaped one; something around 3/4 cup of brown sugar is a safe reading. The parenthesis is not explained in the text.
- No flour is listed, and that is correctThe dough is the flour. There is no need to add any.
- Steaming, since no time is givenFill a well-buttered pudding basin or mold two-thirds full, cover tightly with buttered parchment and foil or a tied cloth, and set on a rack in a pot with boiling water halfway up the side. Two hours at a steady simmer for a 1 1/2-quart mold, topping up with boiling water; a skewer should come out clean.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; the quantities suggest something in the range of six servings. A warm sauce -- hard sauce, a thin custard, or lemon sauce -- suits it.
- CurrantsDried currants, not fresh red ones. Modern packaged fruit needs no soaking; a brief rinse is enough.
Steamed and boiled puddings survived in North American cookbooks long after home baking ovens became reliable, partly because they did not require heating an oven and partly because they used up whatever was on hand -- stale bread, sour milk, a bowl of dough. This recipe belongs to the same household logic as pancake batter started from a bread sponge: as long as a family baked its own bread several times a week, a live sponge was a standing kitchen ingredient rather than something to be made specially. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to Canadian households from the 1910s onward, was a flour-promotion book assembled largely from contributions sent in by women who used the flour, which is why so many of its recipes assume knowledge the modern reader no longer has -- here, that the cook is already mid-way through a batch of bread and knows what her sponge looks like when it is ready to be mixed down.