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Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake: Beat
Butter a quart melon mold and scatter over it a few currants, raisins, nut meats, or tiny bits of citron. Fill the mold almost to the top with broken bits of cake, and sprinkle a little fruit through it if the pieces are of plain cake. Beat 2 eggs, stir in 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, a dash salt, and the milk. Pour this custard over the cake in the mold, turning in a little at a time to allow the cake to absorb the liquid, until all the custard is used.
Put on cover and place the mold in a kettle of boiling water, not allowing the water to come quite to the top of the mold. Place a lid on the kettle and let it boil an hour. Serve the pudding hot, with wine or fruit sauce.
Crumb Pudding. 3 eggs, cupful sugar, cupful soft bread crumbs, cupful farina, cupful broken nut meats, cupful butter, cupful powdered sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls milk, 1/4 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Beat the yolks of eggs until light and lemon-colored. Gradually add sugar, bread crumbs, and farina. Mix perfectly, fold in the whites of eggs beaten stiff, and nut meats. Pour into 2 layer-cake pans which have been buttered and floured. Bake half an hour in a slow oven. When slightly cooled, put the layers together with a creamy sauce made as follows:
Cream cupful butter, add gradually cupful powdered sugar and 2 tablespoonfuls milk, add drop by drop. Flavor with 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Vanilla. Serve hot.-KATHERINE A.
FRENCH.
Peach Crumb Pudding. 1 pint stale-bread crumbs, 1 tablespoonful melted butter, 2 eggs, cupful sugar.
On a pint of stale-bread crumbs pour boiling water and stir in melted butter. After standing till thoroughly soaked, add eggs and sugar. On the bottom of a buttered dish put a thin layer of this batter, over it a layer of sliced peaches, and so on, dredging each layer of peaches with sugar, till the dish is full, having batter at the top. About an hour in a moderate oven will be required for the baking. Serve with sweetened cream.
Suet Cherry Roly-Poly. 5 ounces suet, pound flour, 1 teaspoonful salt.
Four ways to use up stale cake and bread, printed as a run-on block. The transcription has lost most of the fractions — every bare "cupful" in the crumb puddings almost certainly began as a half or a quarter cupful — so treat the quantities as a guide and rebalance by eye.
- The missing milkThe first pudding says "stir in… the milk" without ever stating how much; the quantity was presumably in an ingredient list that has not survived in this transcription. For a quart mold packed with cake, a custard of 2 eggs would want roughly 1½ to 2 cups of milk; the cake should be thoroughly soaked but not swimming.
- Steaming, not boilingThe mold sits in a kettle of water that must not reach its rim, with a lid on the kettle. Keep the water at a bare simmer rather than a hard boil — violent boiling slops water past the mold cover and curdles the custard at the edges. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the level never drops below halfway.
- A quart melon moldA fluted tinned mold with a clip-on lid, about 4 cups. Any covered pudding basin or a 1-quart heatproof bowl with buttered foil tied down will do. Butter it heavily and dust with sugar if you want a clean turn-out.
- Oven temperaturesA slow oven for the crumb pudding layers is about 300–325°F; a moderate oven for the peach pudding is about 350–375°F. The layer pudding is essentially a flourless torte and is done when the centre springs back.
- FarinaUncooked farina — the fine wheat semolina sold as Cream of Wheat. It is used dry here, absorbing moisture from the eggs, and gives the layers their slightly sandy crumb. Fine semolina is a close substitute.
- The creamy sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and two tablespoons of milk added drop by drop is a hard sauce, not a pourable one. Adding the milk too fast splits it. The instruction to "serve hot" applies to the pudding; the filling will soften and slump if the layers are still warm, so let them cool to just above room temperature.
- Peach pudding proportionsA pint of crumbs soaked with boiling water should be moist and clumping, not soupy — add the water a splash at a time and stop while the crumbs still hold their shape. Use firm ripe freestone peaches; very juicy fruit will thin the batter and lengthen the bake past the stated hour.
- Wine sauceWine sauces of the period were usually sugar, butter and a fortified wine — sherry, madeira or port — thickened lightly and served warm. The recipe also offers a fruit sauce, which can be crushed berries and sugar.
- The roly-poly is cut offThe final entry gives suet, flour and salt and then stops mid-recipe. It is a standard suet crust rolled with cherries; the liquid, the fruit quantity and the whole method are missing.
- YieldThe original gives no yields. As a guide, the molded pudding will serve about 4 to 6; the layered crumb pudding cuts into roughly 8 wedges; the peach pudding suits a dish of about 2 quarts and serves about 6.
Cookbooks of this period treated leftover cake and dry bread as a raw material rather than a problem, and Household Discoveries — a compendium of thrift and domestic economy rather than a chef's book — is squarely in that tradition. The steamed molded pudding descends from the British boiled pudding, which moved from a floured cloth to a tin mold over the nineteenth century as manufactured kitchenware became cheap. The named plug for "McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla" in the contributed crumb pudding is worth noticing: reader-submitted recipes in books like this often carried brand names intact, and vanilla extract was then an aggressively advertised product surrounded by cheap vanillin imitations, so specifying a maker can plausibly be read as a claim about quality. Suet, in the unfinished roly-poly, was still the ordinary household fat for steamed puddings, bought from the butcher and chopped at home.