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Cherry Bread
Cut stale bread in thin slices and thickly butter each. Open 1 quart can of cherries, dilute the syrup with an equal amount of boiling water; heat to the boiling point, add the cherries and 1 teaspoonful of corn-starch wet in cold water.
Stir and boil for three minutes. Put 2 slices of the bread side by side on a dish and pour over them a part of the hot syrup and fruit. Add 2 more slices and more of the fruit, then 2 more with the remainder. Set all aside until very cold. Just before serving cover top and sides with a meringue and serve with plain cream.
This is a cold charlotte-style pudding built from buttered stale bread and canned cherries, assembled in advance and finished with meringue at the table. Nearly everything depends on the chilling step.
- Chill it properly"Set all aside until very cold" means several hours in the refrigerator, and overnight does no harm. The bread needs time to absorb the syrup; served after an hour it is soggy toast in juice.
- A quart can of cherriesAbout 32 oz, fruit and syrup together. Modern canned cherries come in 14-15 oz cans, so use two, or one 24 oz jar of sour cherries in light syrup plus a little water. The recipe dilutes the syrup rather than sweetening further, so a light syrup rather than a heavy one suits it best.
- Butter thickly, and mean itThe recipe is emphatic about this, and a generous layer of soft butter will slow how fast the slices take up syrup. The text does not say whether to butter one side or both.
- The cornstarchOne teaspoon in roughly three cups of liquid gives a barely-thickened syrup, not a pie filling. That is deliberate; it needs to run into the bread. Slake it in a tablespoon of cold water and give it the full three minutes at a boil to cook out the raw starch.
- The breadA plain white loaf, a day or two old, cut about a quarter-inch thick with crusts on or off as you like. Enriched sandwich bread and sourdough both fight the dish, one too sweet and soft, the other too assertive.
- The meringueA plain uncooked meringue of beaten whites and sugar spread over a cold pudding is raw egg. If that concerns you, use pasteurized whites, or make an Italian meringue with hot sugar syrup, which also holds its shape better on a wet surface.
- Plain creamUnwhipped, unsweetened pouring cream, passed at the table. Modern heavy cream is fine; single or light cream is closer to what was meant.
- YieldSix slices of bread and a quart of fruit serve four to six. Assemble it in a shallow dish with sides, since the syrup will pool.
Bread puddings built from buttered slices and stewed fruit run through nineteenth-century English and American cookery under a dozen names, and related thrift desserts -- summer pudding, cherry charlotte, brown Betty -- vary the form with unbuttered bread, uncooked fruit or baked crumbs. All of them exist for the same reason: stale bread was too valuable to throw out and too dull to eat plain. What dates this particular version is the can. By the time this recipe was being compiled, commercially canned fruit was cheap and reliable enough that a household could put a cherry dessert on the table in February, and the recipe leans on that syrup rather than on sugar bought separately. The meringue on top is the one bit of display, added at the last minute to turn a thrift dish into something that could be carried in to guests.