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Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake: Pudding
Orange Pudding. 1½ cupfuls stale-bread crumbs, 1 cupful cold water, 1 cupful sugar, 1 cupful orange juice, Juice lemon, 2 eggs, 1 tablespoonful melted butter, teaspoonful salt, 2 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, teaspoonful orange extract.
STALE BREAD AND CAKE PUDDINGS 957 Soak the crumbs in water twenty minutes, then add the sugar, orange, and lemon juice, the yolks of eggs slightly beaten, the butter and salt.
Beat till thoroughly mixed, pour in a buttered dish, and bake in a moderate oven till the pudding is firm. Allow it to cool slightly and cover with a 3 a, Saratoga Chip Kettle; b, Tea Kettle Steamer. a meringue made from the whites of the eggs, sugar, and orange flavoring. Brown delicately, and serve hot or cold.
Walnut Pudding.
Meats from 12 English walnuts, 1 cupful stale brown-bread crumbs, 2 cupfuls milk, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, 3 eggs, 1 cupful sugar, 8 eggs, → cupful chopped suets 3 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar.
Soak the crumbs in water thirty minutes, then add juice and grated rind of the lemon. Beat the yolks of eggs till thick and lemon-colored, add sugar and suet, and mix thoroughly.
Add the other ingredients. Bake an hour. Beat the whites of eggs to a dry froth and make a meringue with 3 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar.
Two puddings share this entry, and only the first survives the printing intact. The Orange Pudding is a straightforward baked custard thickened with bread rather than flour; the Walnut Pudding beside it has been mangled in typesetting and cannot be followed as printed.
- The hinge: bake it gently and stop when it just setsThis is an egg custard carrying a lot of acid from the orange and lemon juice. A moderate oven means 350F, and 40 to 50 minutes in a buttered 1½-quart dish is usually enough. Pushed hotter or longer, the acid and heat together curdle the eggs and the pudding weeps. A pan of hot water around the dish is cheap insurance.
- Fractional measures lost in printing"Teaspoonful salt" almost certainly began life as a fraction — these books routinely call for ⅛ or ¼ teaspoon in a sweet pudding, and a full teaspoon would be aggressively salty. Treat the salt as ¼ teaspoon at most. The "→ cupful chopped suets" in the second recipe is the same problem, unrecoverable.
- Orange and lemon juiceA cupful of orange juice is roughly three medium oranges; "juice lemon" means the juice of one whole lemon, about 3 tablespoons. Fresh juice matters here because it is the only flavour in the base besides sugar.
- Orange extractAgain a fraction has likely dropped out; ½ teaspoon in the meringue is plenty. Period orange extract was alcohol-based.
- The meringueTwo whites will take about 4 tablespoons of sugar rather than the 2 given, if you want a stable meringue. Spread it on the pudding while the pudding is still warm and bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes to brown, or run it briefly under a broiler while watching it.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old white bread torn or rubbed by hand, not dry commercial crumbs, which will absorb the water unevenly and stay gritty. Twenty minutes of soaking should leave a smooth mush. Brown bread in the walnut recipe means a dark loaf, steamed or wholemeal.
- The Walnut Pudding is not usable as printedThe ingredient list contains two separate sets of quantities (3 eggs and 8 eggs, two cupfuls of sugar), the walnuts and milk never appear in the method, and the method calls for a lemon that is not in the list. Two recipes have been run together by the compositor. Use a modern walnut pudding if you want that dish.
- YieldThe Orange Pudding serves six in small dishes. It is better cold than hot, when the custard has firmed and the orange reads more clearly.
Bread puddings of this kind sit in a chapter whose whole premise is that nothing edible leaves the house as waste — Household Discoveries (early 1900s) treats stale bread and cake as a standing kitchen resource rather than a leftover, and gives dozens of ways to spend it. What distinguishes the orange version is that oranges were still comparatively costly in many American households, sold by the piece; folding a cupful of juice into a crumb pudding was a way of making three oranges flavour a dish for six. The technique — soak crumbs, enrich with yolks, cap with a meringue made from the leftover whites — is the same economy applied twice over, and it anticipates the lemon and orange "sponge" puddings found in later American cookbooks.