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Crumb Spice Pudding
Take 1 cupful of dry bread crumbs, add 1 pint of hot milk, cover and let stand until the milk is absorbed. Add 1/4 teaspoonful of salt, 1 scant 1/2 cupful of molasses, 1/4 teaspoonful of cinnamon, a good pinch each of cloves, nutmeg, allspice, mace and ginger, and 2/3 of a cupful of seeded raisins which have been steamed for five minutes. Add I well-beaten egg, turn into a greased pudding pan and bake in a moderate oven for nearly one hour.
A thrift pudding built on stale bread and molasses, closer to a soft baked custard than to a steamed plum pudding. It needs little translation, but a few details are worth pinning down.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. At an hour the centre should be just set with a slight wobble; a knife inserted off-centre comes out clean.
- The crumbsIn period usage "dry bread crumbs" is the counterpart of soft or fresh crumbs: bread dried out and crumbled or rolled, which may be fairly fine. Crumbled day-old white bread works well here; very fine packaged crumbs will pack more tightly and can give a denser result.
- MeasuresA pint of milk is 2 cups. "A scant 1/2 cupful" of molasses means just under 1/2 cup — the difference matters, since molasses carries the whole sweetening load.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of the period. Sorghum syrup works if you have it.
- Steaming the raisinsFive minutes over steam plumps them so they do not draw moisture out of the custard as it bakes. Soaking in hot water for ten minutes and draining well does the same job.
- Temper the eggThe milk-soaked crumbs should be no more than warm before the beaten egg goes in, or the egg will set in threads. Cooling the mixture to lukewarm first is worth the wait.
- Pudding panA 1 1/2-quart baking dish is the right size. Setting it in a pan of hot water gives a softer, more even set, though the original does not call for it.
- YieldServes four to six. Best warm, with cream or a plain milk sauce; the spice deepens noticeably by the second day.
This is a bread pudding written for a household counting pennies: the only costly item is the egg, and even that appears just once. Molasses does the sweetening because for much of the nineteenth century it was generally the cheaper option against refined sugar, and the heavy hand with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, mace and ginger is doing the work that dried fruit and brandy do in a richer Christmas pudding — supplying the sense of a spiced festive sweet at almost no cost. Recipes of this kind were a standard fixture of frugal-cookery collections and wartime and Depression-era pamphlets, where stale bread was treated as an ingredient rather than waste. The technique of soaking crumbs in scalded milk before baking is very old, and is a relative of the English bread and butter puddings built on buttered slices; what marks this version as an economy recipe is the single egg and the absence of butter.