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Huckleberry Pudding
Butter a pudding dish and line it with bread, cut in slices half an inch thick and buttered; remove the crust and cut the slices to fit the dish. Fill the lined dish with huckleberries, sprinkle over them sugar and the grated rind and juice of a lemon. Place some slices of buttered bread over the whole. Set the dish in a pan of water in a hot oven; cover the pudding with a plate and bake one and one-half hours. When the pudding is done put roughly over the top a meringue made of the whites of two eggs beaten to a stiff froth and two tablespoons of powdered sugar added to them. Return to the oven long enough to brown lightly and serve hot. A sauce may be served with this pudding or not.
A bread-lined berry pudding of the kind that turns a loaf past its best into dessert. Two things in the original need translating: the sugar is unmeasured, and "powdered sugar" is not what sits in your cupboard under that name.
- Oven and water bath"A hot oven" in a book of this vintage is generally taken to mean something around 400F or above, though period sources differ; in any case the dish sits in a pan of water and is covered with a plate, so the pudding itself stays near boiling. Set the oven to 375F and keep the water topped up; it should stay hot but not boil away.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term means finely ground granulated sugar, what is now sold as caster or superfine. Confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will make a chalkier meringue; use caster if you have it.
- Sugar for the berriesNo quantity is given. Three-quarters of a cup suits about 5 cups of berries, less if they are cultivated and sweet, more for tart wild fruit.
- HuckleberriesTrue huckleberries are wild-gathered and rarely sold; they have larger, crunchier seeds and a sharper flavor. Blueberries substitute directly by volume, though the finished pudding will be milder and looser.
- The breadUse a firm white sandwich loaf a day or two old, cut a full half inch thick and buttered on one side. Fresh, soft bread disintegrates into the juice instead of holding the pudding together.
- Baking timeAn hour and a half is not excessive here: the covered water bath cooks gently and the bread needs time to absorb the berry juice. The pudding is done when the fruit has collapsed and the top layer is saturated through.
- Browning the meringueUncover, spread the meringue, and return to the oven for 8 to 10 minutes at 375F, or 3 to 4 minutes under a broiler with the door watched. Two egg whites and two tablespoons of sugar make a thin, soft meringue rather than a stiff cap.
- Yield and sauceThe recipe gives no dish size or number of servings; a 1 1/2-quart dish will serve about six. The optional sauce is unspecified -- a thin custard, cream, or a lemon hard sauce would all suit; anything cold and rich reads well against the hot fruit.
Bread-lined fruit puddings are the thrifty end of English dessert cookery, close cousins to summer pudding and to the American brown Betty, and they exist because stale bread was too valuable to waste and berries arrived all at once in quantity. Huckleberries in particular were a gathered rather than a bought fruit through the nineteenth century: they grow on wild low shrubs, resist cultivation, and were brought to town markets in season by pickers, which may help explain why they appear so often in older American cookbooks and so seldom in new ones. The finishing meringue, added after the pudding is already cooked, is often said to be a Victorian touch — as queen of puddings and its relatives were already current by the middle of the nineteenth century — a way of dressing a plain nursery pudding for the dinner table with two egg whites and a few minutes' extra heat.