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To make a plain pudding
Weigh three quarters of a pound of any odd scraps of bread, whether crust or crumb, cut them small, and pour on them a pint and a half of boiling water, to soak them well. Let it stand till the water is cool, then press it out, and mash the bread smooth with the back of a spoon. Add to it, a tea-spoonful of beaten ginger, some moist sugar, and three quarters of a lb. of currants. Mix all well together, and lay it in a pan well buttered. Flatten it down with a spoon, and lay some pieces of butter on the tod. Bake it in a moderate oven, and serve it hot. When cold, it will turn out of the pan, and eat like good plain cheese cakes.
An eggless, milkless bread pudding built entirely from stale scraps, sweetened with brown sugar and bulked with dried currants. A few of its terms and its missing bake time need filling in.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (175C) by modern reckoning. The recipe gives no time; expect somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour in a buttered dish of about 8 inches square, until the top is set and browned.
- The pint is probably imperialA pint and a half in a British book of this period is 30 fl oz, not 24. The exact figure matters little here: the water is squeezed out again, and you only need enough to soak 12 oz of bread thoroughly.
- Squeeze hardWith no eggs or milk to bind it, the pudding has little but the pressed bread to hold it together, and water left behind will leave the mixture sodden rather than firm.
- Beaten gingerDried ginger root pounded in a mortar, i.e. ground ginger. A level teaspoon of the modern jarred sort is the equivalent.
- Moist sugarUnrefined or partly refined sugar that had not been dried out, closest now to light brown or soft brown sugar. The recipe gives no quantity; 4 to 5 oz suits 12 oz of bread and 12 oz of currants.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisin, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Twelve ounces is a heavy load of fruit and supplies much of the sweetness and moisture of the finished pudding.
- "On the tod"Almost certainly a misprint for "on the top." Dot the surface with butter before baking; with the buttered pan it is the only fat in the dish.
- Yield and servingPerhaps six to eight portions. Hot, it is a spoon pudding; the recipe says that when cold it will turn out of the pan, which is the point of the "plain cheese cakes" comparison.
"Plain" in an old pudding title is often taken as a technical word rather than a modest one, though in practice it was a loose descriptor: broadly it suggests a pudding made without the expensive things — eggs, cream, suet or spirits — that turned the same bread and fruit into a rich pudding for company. Bread puddings of this frugal kind belong to the long English tradition of using up the stale ends of a household's loaf, a daily problem when bread was baked in quantity and went hard within days, and cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are full of them. Currants and dried ginger were the two cheap flavourings almost any kitchen kept, ginger having been a common English spice since the medieval period and Zante currants arriving in bulk from the Greek islands. The closing comparison to cheesecakes reflects an older sense of that word, when a cheesecake meant a small sweet tart of curd or fruit rather than the set cream confection understood today.