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Pear Bread Pudding
Slice and stew the pears in a syrup made with a pint each of sugar and water, adding the juice of a lemon, then place half of this in a pudding dish. Have ready a pint of bread crumbs mixed with a tablespoon of butter, half a cup of sugar, a cup of warm water, and, lastly, the whipped whites of two eggs. Place this on the pears in the dish, pouring over the top the rest of the fruit. Grate a little nutmeg over this; sprinkle a tablespoonful of crumbs on top with a little sugar and bake, covered, an hour and a quarter. Remove cover and brown the last few minutes. Serve with a sweet or tart sauce as preferred.
A late-Victorian bread pudding that leans on the fruit rather than on custard — there are no yolks and no milk in it, so it bakes up light and rather more like a steamed crumb pudding than the eggy version most cooks expect. The original assumes you know how many pears to buy; it does not say.
- Quantity of pearsUnstated in the original. A pint each of sugar and water makes enough syrup for roughly 6 to 8 firm pears, sliced — about 2 to 2 1/2 lb. Choose fruit that is ripe but still resistant, since it stews once and bakes again.
- Measuring by the pintA pint here is 2 cups. "A pint of sugar" is a volume measure, not a weight, and comes to about 14 oz / 400 g of granulated. "A pint of bread crumbs" means 2 cups of soft crumbs torn from stale bread, not dry commercial crumbs, which would absorb the water differently and turn pasty.
- Oven temperatureNone given. A covered fruit pudding of this kind would suit a moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F / 165-175C, for the hour and a quarter, then uncovered for the last few minutes to brown the top, as the recipe directs.
- Stew the pears lightlyThey finish cooking in the oven for well over an hour. Poach only until a knife slides in with slight resistance — five to ten minutes depending on ripeness — or the fruit collapses into sauce and the layers disappear.
- The whipped whitesFold them into the crumb mixture last and gently, as written. They are the only leavening in the dish; beaten to soft peaks and folded rather than stirred, they keep the crumb layer from baking into a dense slab.
- Covering the dishA lid or foil traps steam and keeps the top layer of fruit from drying to leather over 75 minutes. Do not skip it, and do not seal it so tightly that no steam escapes at all.
- Syrup left overThere may be more syrup than the pears absorb. The recipe layers fruit and syrup together, but if you prefer you can drain the fruit and boil the surplus down by half; with the lemon in it, that would do for one of the sauces the recipe offers as an option.
- YieldEnough for roughly a 2-quart baking dish, serving about 6 to 8. Good warm rather than hot, and the layers hold together better after 20 minutes standing.
Bread puddings of this type were a standard household answer to stale bread long before they were dessert, and fruit versions were common in American cookery of the period. This one is notable for what it leaves out: no milk, no yolks, no suet. The crumb layer is bound with nothing but butter, sugar, warm water and beaten whites, which makes it cheaper than a custard pudding and lighter than an English bread-and-butter one, and puts the sweetness and body entirely on the stewed fruit. Pears were widely grown in American orchards in this period and, being poor keepers once ripe, generated exactly the sort of glut such recipes help absorb. The instruction to serve with "a sweet or tart sauce as preferred" is characteristic of the era's recipe writing, which generally assumed the cook had a repertoire of pudding sauces at hand and needed no further direction.