Home › Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake › Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake: Place
Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake: Place
Remove the fiber and skin from suet, chop fine, add flour and salt, mix well. Add sufficient cold water to make it stick, and roll out on a well-floured board. Cover with pitted cherries, dust with sugar, and roll quickly; tie in a well-floured cloth, leaving room for it to swell. Place in a kettle of boiling water and keep it boiling steadily two hours, or it may be steamed two hours and a half.
Serve hot with any sweet sauce, or sweetened cream.
Marmalade Pudding. pound bread crumbs, pound brown sugar, pound suet, 4 eggs, 1 small jar orange marmalade.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Mix together, put in a mold with tight-fitting cover, and boil three hours.
Huckleberry Pudding.
Line pudding dish with buttered slices of bread. Fill with huckleberries, sprinkle over sugar and the grated rind and juice of a lemon.
Place on top of buttered bread. Set in a pan of water in a hot oven; cover the pudding with a plate, and bake one and a half hours. When the pudding is done, cover with a meringue made of the whites of 2 eggs beaten to a stiff froth and 2 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar. Return to the oven to brown lightly, and serve hot.
Plain Plum Pudding. bowl in a pan of cracked ice, and stir constantly until it thickens; then add the whipped cream; turn into a mold and set away to harden. Serve with whipped cream.
Snow Pudding. 2 tablespoonfuls gelatin, 1 cupful sugar, 2 eggs, Juice 2 lemons, 2 cupfuls milk, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 1 cupful boiling water.
Let the gelatin soak half an hour in cold water, pour over it boiling water, add sugar, and stir till dissolved; add the lemon juice, and strain; set in ice water. When cold, whip with an egg beater until white as snow; beat the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, and stir them in. pound candied lemon peel pudding into it, and set in a cold Dip a mold in cold water, pour the 4 cupfuls flour, 1 pound currants, 2 cupfuls sugar, 1 pound raisins, chopped fine, 1 pound suet chopped fine, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder, Nutmeg and cinnamon.
Sift the flour, baking powder, spices, and salt; add other ingredients. When well mixed, add sufficient cold water or milk to make a batter just thick enough to spoon into the mold. Leave room for it to rise.
Cover closely, and boil six hours.
Fluff Pudding. 2 tablespoonfuls gelatin, 2 cupfuls cream, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 2 cupfuls milk, 3 eggs, cupful sugar.
Soak the gelatin in cold water half an hour. Scald the milk, and dissolve the gelatin in it. Beat the yolks and sugar together, stir into the boiling milk, and cook two minutes. Take from the fire, add the vanilla, and turn into a bowl to cool. Stand the place till it hardens.
Sauce for Pudding.
Scald the milk; beat the yolks of eggs and a cupful sugar together, stir into the boiling milk. Cook two minutes, add vanilla, and pour out to cool. Dish the pudding with the sauce poured about it.
This page is a run of several distinct puddings that the scanner has interleaved: a boiled cherry roly-poly, marmalade pudding, huckleberry pudding, plain plum pudding, snow pudding, fluff pudding and a custard sauce. Read it as a group of recipes rather than one, and expect gaps where fractions have dropped out of the original type.
- Lost fractionsWherever the text reads "pound bread crumbs" or "pound candied lemon peel" a fraction has fallen out in printing. Half a pound each of crumbs, sugar and suet with four eggs and a small jar of marmalade is one plausible reading of the marmalade pudding, and the peel in the plum pudding was probably a quarter or half pound, but neither can be recovered from this page. Treat any bare "pound" as unverified.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it is what makes a boiled pudding light rather than greasy. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Frozen suet grates far more easily than it chops, and it should stay in visible flecks, not be worked into the flour.
- Boiling in a clothThe cloth is floured so a skin forms on contact with the water and keeps it out of the dough. Tie loosely, and keep the water at a steady rolling boil the whole time, topping up with boiling water from a kettle. Water that goes off the boil, or cold water added mid-cook, gives a sodden pudding.
- Six hours means six hoursThe plain plum pudding is a flour-and-suet batter with two pounds of dried fruit in it; the long boil is what cooks the interior and softens the fruit. A pudding basin with a tight lid set on a trivet in a covered stockpot does the same job as a mold in a kettle.
- "A hot oven" for the huckleberry pudding"Hot" in period usage is usually somewhere around 400-450F, but the dish sits in a water bath under a plate for an hour and a half, so 350F is closer to the intent. Brown the meringue at 350F for eight to ten minutes.
- HuckleberriesTrue huckleberries are a wild seasonal berry with hard seeds. Cultivated blueberries substitute by volume and are the usual modern stand-in. Line the dish with bread thick enough to hold the juice.
- GelatinTwo tablespoons of the granulated gelatin sold in 1900 is roughly two to three modern quarter-ounce envelopes. One envelope sets two cups of liquid to a soft mold, so for snow pudding start with two envelopes and hold the third back. The half-hour cold soak still matters: undissolved granules give a stringy set.
- Raw whites in the snow puddingThe beaten whites are folded into cooled gelatin and never cooked. If the pudding is going to children, the elderly or anyone pregnant, use pasteurized whites; the whipping behaves the same.
- Brand namesCalumet baking powder and McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla are named brands rather than technical requirements, and such namings often reflect an advertising arrangement. Any double-acting baking powder and any good vanilla extract will do.
- YieldThe plum pudding as written is a large one, four cupfuls of flour and two pounds of fruit, and would serve a dozen or more in thin slices. No quantities survive for the cherry pudding, so its yield cannot be judged; the marmalade pudding is a moderate one.
Boiled suet puddings tied in a floured cloth are the older English form of the Christmas pudding, and they persisted in American household books long after the pudding basin and the steamer had begun to replace the cloth. What holds this particular page together is thrift: it sits in a section on using up stale bread and cake, and the huckleberry and marmalade puddings both turn dry crumbs into a company dessert. The two gelatin puddings show the other half of the period's kitchen, the manufactured one, granulated gelatin having become cheap and reliable by the turn of the century. The named brands may suggest that this material was compiled from advertising-supported sources, where a manufacturer's baking powder or vanilla was written straight into the ingredient list, a practice common in community and premium cookbooks of the era.