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Fig Bread Pudding
Soak three cups of breadcrumbs in one and one-fourth pints of water and beat into this four eggs, a pinch of salt, two tablespoons of sugar, and one and one-third cups of chopped figs. (The figs should be first dredged in flour.) Flavour with lemon or nutmeg. Beat well, then place in pudding-dish and bake slowly for an hour and a half, or place pudding in tight-covered vessel which is to be placed in a pot of boiling water and kept at a boil for two and a half hours. Serve with hard sauce.
A plain steamed-or-baked bread pudding stretched with dried figs, written for cooks who kept dried fruit in the pantry year round. Two things need attention: the liquid is water, not milk, and the oven is a slow one.
- Water, not milkSoaking the crumbs in water gives a lean, plain pudding rather than a rich custard; it reads as an economy version. Whole milk in place of the water produces the richer custard most modern palates expect, with no other change.
- The measurementsOne and one-fourth pints is 2 1/2 cups. With three cups of crumbs that is a very wet mixture; use dry crumbs from stale bread rather than soft fresh ones, or the pudding will not set.
- "Bake slowly"The recipe gives no temperature; a slow oven is usually read as somewhere around 300-325F. An hour and a half at that temperature sets four eggs gently, and a hotter oven risks the custard curdling at the edges.
- Flouring the figsDredging the chopped figs helps keep them from sinking to the bottom of the dish. Shake off the excess.
- The dried figsDried figs vary a good deal in softness. If yours are leathery, cover with hot water for ten minutes and drain before chopping; if they are already moist, skip it.
- The steamed versionThe "tight-covered vessel" is in effect a pudding mould or basin with a lid, standing in a pot of boiling water; the recipe says to keep it at a boil for the full two and a half hours. Butter it well and keep the water topped up. Steaming gives a denser, moister pudding than baking.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, roughly one part butter to two of sugar, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or sherry, chilled firm. It is meant to melt over the hot pudding and is not optional given how lightly sweetened the pudding itself is.
- YieldAbout a 1 1/2-quart pudding, six servings.
Bread pudding is among the oldest forms of thrift baking in the English kitchen -- a way of turning stale loaf into a dish worth setting on the table -- and by the late nineteenth century general cookbooks commonly carried several variations distinguished largely by what fruit went in. Figs appear here as a pantry staple rather than a luxury: imported Smyrna figs and, later, California-grown figs were increasingly available in this period. The alternative of boiling the pudding in a covered basin rather than baking it is the older of the two methods, from the era when a pot over the fire was more reliable than an oven, and it persisted in print long after ranges became common.