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Uncooked Cherry Bread Pudding
Slice a loaf of dry bread; spread with butter; place in layers in a pudding-dish with stewed or spiced cherries poured over. Let stand a half hour and serve with a custard or German Sauce.
An assembly rather than a baked pudding: dry bread, butter, hot fruit and syrup, left to soften. Everything depends on the ratio of liquid to bread.
- The hinge: enough syrupThe cherries must be soupy, not drained. Figure on roughly a cup of fruit with its syrup for every two thick slices of bread; too much liquid and the bread turns to paste, too little and the centre stays dry and papery.
- "Dry bread" means stale, not toastedA close-crumbed white loaf a day or two old, cut about half an inch thick. Modern soft sandwich bread collapses; a plain country loaf or brioche holds its layers. The recipe says only "spread with butter"; buttering one side slows the soak.
- Stewed or spiced cherriesSour cherries were widely used in American fruit cookery of this period. Stew pitted sour cherries with sugar to taste until they release their juice; "spiced" cherries in books of this date are usually a vinegar-and-sugar preserve with cinnamon, clove and allspice, sharper and darker than plain stewed fruit, though the term can also mean fruit stewed with spices alone. Jarred sour cherries in syrup work directly.
- Pour the fruit hotThe recipe does not say so, but hot fruit and syrup over cold buttered bread is what makes half an hour sufficient. Cold fruit needs an hour or more, and is better left in the refrigerator overnight under a plate and a light weight.
- Pudding-dishAny deep straight-sided dish that will take the sliced loaf; the recipe gives no size. Since nothing goes in the oven, glass or china is fine and lets you see the soak line.
- German SauceProbably a wine-foam sauce, Weinschaumsauce, of egg yolks, sugar and white wine or sherry beaten over hot water until thick, close to zabaglione; the recipe does not define it. Whisk it to 160F so the yolks are safe, then serve at once; it deflates quickly.
- CustardHere a pouring custard, crème anglaise, not a set baked one. Thin enough to run over the slice.
- YieldA loaf's worth of slices will serve roughly six to eight. Cut down and serve in individual glasses if you want clean layers.
Bread and stewed fruit layered cold is the thrifty cousin of the baked bread pudding, and in nineteenth-century American books it appears under many names — brown betty when baked, for instance. One element that suggests a German-American kitchen is the sauce: Weinschaumsauce is often said to have accompanied sweet puddings in German households, though here custard is offered as an equal alternative, and spiced cherries — pickled in sugar and vinegar with whole spices — were a Pennsylvania and Midwestern preserving-season staple wherever sour cherry trees grew. Sour cherries do not travel or keep fresh well, which is why so many cherry recipes in books of this era begin with fruit already stewed, spiced or canned rather than fresh from the tree.