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Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake: Make
Make a sponge cake, and bake in a solid loaf, either round or oblong.
When cool, take out the center, leaving the crust an inch thick on the sides and bottom. Make an icing of 2 ounces chocolate, a cupful sugar, cupful water, and McIlhenny's Vanilla to flavor. Melt the chocolate and add to it slowly the sugar and water boiled to a sirup which will spin a thread. Flavor, and brush with it at once the entire cake, inside and out, until it is well coated. Just before serving, fill with rich, sweet cream (about a cupful), whipped, sweetened, and flavored.
Pineapple Pudding.
Slices of stale cake, 1 pineapple, cupful sugar, 1 cupful cold water.
STALE BREAD AND CAKE PUDDINGS Line a buttered pudding dish with slices of stale cake. Pare and slice the pineapple thinly. Cover each layer of cake with the fruit, sprinkling it with sugar; cover with cake, then pineapple. Make the top layer cake, and over all pour the water.
Cover, and bake slowly two hours.
Eat hot with hard sauce.
Cabinet Pudding. 3 cupfuls cake, 1 cupful milk, 2 eggs, Salt, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, cupful raisins, nut meats, and citron.
Three recipes have run together here: a hollowed sponge loaf coated in chocolate syrup, a baked pineapple-and-cake pudding, and the ingredient list for a cabinet pudding whose method was lost in the run-on. All are ways of using up cake that has gone dry.
- Missing fractionsThe original printing may have carried fractions that dropped out in transcription: "cupful sugar," "cupful raisins," "cupful water" in a list scaled to two eggs could have read as halves or quarters. This is a guess rather than a certainty; treat the quantities as approximate and taste as you go.
- The thread stageSugar and water boiled "to a sirup which will spin a thread" is usually given as roughly 230-235F on a thermometer. Boiled beyond that, the coating tends to set harder and duller rather than glossy.
- Coat while hotThe recipe says to brush the cake "at once," while the syrup is still hot and fluid. It thickens as it cools and will not spread evenly over the crumb.
- McIlhenny's VanillaA brand name of the period. Any good vanilla extract does the job; a teaspoon is enough for this quantity of syrup.
- "Bake slowly"The book states no temperature. A modern slow oven, about 300-325F, is the usual equivalent; two hours at that heat softens fresh pineapple and lets the cake absorb the juice.
- Fresh pineapple only in the baked dishRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which breaks down protein — harmless here because the pudding is baked, but do not fold raw pineapple into the whipped cream filling of the first recipe or into any gelatin. Canned pineapple is already heat-treated and behaves itself.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, flavored with vanilla or a spirit, chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding so it melts. It is not cooked, and the book assumes every reader already knows this.
- Cabinet pudding, no methodOnly the ingredients survive here. Traditionally the cake and fruit are layered in a buttered mold, the eggs, milk, sugar and salt are beaten together and poured over, and the mold is steamed or baked in a water bath until the custard is just set — about 170–175°F at the center. Consult a complete recipe for timings.
Puddings built out of stale cake belong to a kitchen with no reliable way to keep baked goods soft and no willingness to throw them away. A sponge loaf left over from Sunday was worth more, by Monday, as the lining of a pudding dish than as cake. The first recipe here is a hollowed cake sealed with a sugar glaze to keep the crumb from drying further and filled with whipped cream only at the table; cabinet pudding, generally traced to English cookery of the nineteenth century, is the same principle in a mold -- cake, dried fruit and citron bound with a plain custard and steamed. Naming McIlhenny's vanilla where any extract would serve is typical of period books that printed brand names in their recipes. The pineapple is the luxury note: by the turn of the century fresh pineapple had come within reach of more households, and a fruit once treated as a costly centerpiece could be sliced into a pudding made of leftovers.