Home › Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake › Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake
Puddings Made from Stale Bread and Cake
'THE variety of puddings into which stale bread enters is endless. It begins with the old-fashioned, economical pandowdy and ends with the queen of puddings, rich in jam and lovely in merinque. For puddings, use only stale bread or crumbs, rejecting crusts. Do not add the ovendried crumbs, or you will have a pudding as tough as a door mat. Leftovers of fruit, fresh berries, peaches, plums, gooseberries, apples, prunes, apricots, almost anything can enrich a bread pudauing. A cupful canned or stewed fruit or a few spoonfuls jam or marmalade give a morsel of delicious flavoring. The good cook uses common sense and the material she has at hand. If the recipe calls for red raspberries and she has nothing but dried apples, she can season them with spices, and the dessert will be a success. The base of any bread pudding light as a soufflé and large enough for a family of 4 consists of 1 cupful stale-bread crumbs, 2 cupfuls milk, and 1 egg. This may be enriched by almonds, chocolate, nut meats, raisins, currants, and peel or fruit of any description.
Stale cake, especially sponge cake or lady's fingers, may be converted into delicious puddings.
Where the pudding is to be steamed or baked, cut the cake in fingers or break it into crumbs. If the pudding is to be soaked with wine, have a custard, fruit juice, or cream poured over it, after cutting it in slices. Reject icing; it generally makes a pudding sweeter than is desirable. A good plain pudding is made by putting slices of stale cake in a steamer and, when moist, serving with a spoonful strawberry or marmalade sauce. It may be covered when cold with hot stewed berries and served with cream. Stale sponge cake serves as a foundation for charlotte russe and cabinet pudding, or, if steamed, may be covered with strawberries and whipped cream, when it makes an excellent imitation of strawberry shortcake. Bread-Plum Pudding. 1 cupful suet, 1 cupful raisins, 1 cupful currants, cupful citron and candied orange peel, 1 cupful sugar, 3 cupfuls stale-bread crumbs, n eggs, cupful milk, teaspoonful cinnamon, teaspoonful each allspice, cloves, and nutmeg, Grated rind 1 lemon.
Chop the suet fine. Seed the raisins. Slice the citron and orange peel, mix with the currants, sugar, and bread crumbs, moisten with eggs well beaten, and milk, then add the seasonings. Pour into a buttered mold. Steam four hours, and serve with hard sauce.
Two things sit on this page: a general method for turning stale bread and cake into pudding, and a specific steamed bread-plum pudding. Both assume a cook who measures by eye and owns a steamer.
- The hinge: soft crumbs onlyThe warning against oven-dried crumbs is the most useful line here. Dried or packaged crumbs absorb liquid without swelling and set into something dense and rubbery. Tear day-old bread by hand or pulse it briefly, and reject the crusts as instructed.
- The base ratio1 cup soft crumbs to 2 cups milk to 1 egg is a very loose custard that will set only softly. The recipe says it is large enough for a family of 4, but gives no dish, no method and no cooking time or temperature; anything more precise is a modern reconstruction rather than the book's instruction.
- Quantities in the plum puddingSeveral amounts in the ingredient list have no number attached to them: the citron and candied peel, the milk, the spices, and the eggs. Working from comparable steamed puddings of the period, expect around half a cup of mixed peel, half a cup of milk, and a teaspoon each of the spices, but the egg count cannot be recovered from the text with any confidence. Treat the list as a guide rather than a formula.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys and is what gives a steamed pudding its light, open crumb. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is the usual substitute, though the texture is closer and heavier.
- Steaming for four hoursFill a buttered pudding basin or mold no more than two-thirds full, cover tightly with pleated foil or a cloth tied under the rim, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with water reaching halfway up. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water; running the pot dry is the one thing that ruins the pudding.
- Seeding raisinsMuch of the raisin trade at the time was in seeded varieties that had to be slit and picked over, which is why the recipe says to seed them; seedless raisins were also available. Modern raisins are seedless and go straight into the bowl.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce: butter creamed with powdered sugar and flavoured with brandy, rum or vanilla, then chilled firm. A spoonful melts over the hot pudding at the table.
- Working with stale cakeThe advice to discard icing holds, though the book's own reason is simply that it makes the pudding sweeter than is wanted. Modern buttercream will melt to grease and fondant dissolve to syrup under steam.
Bread puddings belong to the older economy of the household kitchen, where a loaf was baked or bought in quantity and nothing went into the bin. The pandowdy named at the start is an American baked fruit dish, characteristically apple with a pastry lid broken into the juices; the queen of puddings at the other end is the English breadcrumb-and-custard pudding layered with jam and finished under meringue. Between them lies the point of the essay: bread crumbs, milk and an egg are a base that will accept whatever the larder holds. The bread-plum pudding is a frugal cousin of the Christmas plum pudding, with crumbs standing in for much of the flour and suet doing the work that butter would do in a cake. "Plum" in these names is traditional and means raisins and dried fruit generally, a usage that long outlived the actual plums. Household Discoveries was a compendium of domestic economy rather than a chef's book, and this page reads accordingly: the recipe is almost an afterthought to the argument that a good cook improvises with what she has.