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Spice Pudding
Take 1 cupful of crusts of bread, packed measure, and soak in 1 pint of milk until soft. Add 1/2 cupful of molasses, 1 cupful of seeded raisins, 1/4 teaspoonful each of salt and ground cloves, cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg. Mix thoroughly and bake in a moderate oven for about threequarters of an hour.
A bread-and-molasses pudding of the frugal sort, with no eggs and no sugar beyond the molasses. It sets by the starch in the soaked crusts, so the texture depends almost entirely on how thoroughly you break the bread down.
- Read the molasses amount with suspicionThe text prints "1½ cupful of molasses" against one pint of milk. Much of the recipe's "1" characters are set as the letter I, though the "1/4 teaspoonful" is not, so the typography is only weak evidence. Half a cup may be the more plausible reading for a pudding of this size; a cup and a half would make it cloying and slack. If in doubt, start at ½ cup and taste the raw mixture.
- Moderate ovenConventionally about 350-375F. Three-quarters of an hour at that heat suits a shallow buttered dish; note the mixture as written runs to well over a quart, so a deeper dish will want closer to an hour and a test with a knife in the centre.
- Crusts, packedDry crusts from a plain white loaf, torn small and pressed into the cup — roughly 2 to 2½ oz. Soft fresh bread absorbs differently and gives a pastier result. Soak until no hard centres remain, then mash with a fork or beat briefly so the bread disperses rather than sitting in lumps.
- Molasses, not blackstrapTable molasses, light or dark, is the likelier intent here, though cheaper grades were also sold for household use. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral, and will dominate the spices. Cane syrup or a dark treacle is the nearer substitute.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, not that seeds were added — this was a chore in the days of muscatels. Any modern seedless raisin does the job; plump them in hot water for ten minutes if they are dry.
- No eggs, so no custardDo not expect a set custard. This bakes to a dense, damp, spiced mass somewhere between a bread pudding and a steamed pudding. Adding an egg changes the character but is a common modern fix.
- SpicingA quarter teaspoon each of cloves, cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg is a full teaspoon of spice in a small pudding — assertive, and intentionally so. Cloves in particular go bitter if overdone, so measure rather than shake.
- YieldAbout four to six servings. Good warm with cream or a plain milk sauce; it firms considerably as it cools and slices the next day.
Puddings built on stale bread, milk and molasses run through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery as the standard way to turn the heel of a loaf into a dessert. Molasses did the work of sugar because it was cheaper, and until the mid-twentieth century it was a common household sweetener in its own right rather than a baking specialty; the heavy hand with cloves, allspice and nutmeg is characteristic of molasses baking, where the spices balance the syrup's slight bitterness. The absence of eggs is the telling detail: a pudding of this kind was designed to set on bread starch alone. The dish is a cousin of Indian pudding and of British bread-and-butter pudding, sharing the same premise that nothing edible in the bread box goes to waste.