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Currant Pudding
6 slices stale bread 4 ounces raspberries 1 pound red currants 4 ounces sugar 1 gill of cream Cook the fruit and sugar together for ten minutes; then dip the slices of bread into the juice, and line a plain pudding basin with it, each piece overlapping. Then fill the basin with the fruit, put a piece of bread on top, cut the bread round the edge to make it even with the basin; put a plate over and a heavy weight on top, and leave it until it sets, which will be in about four hours. Turn out, and put the whipped cream on top. This can be made with various kinds of fruit in season.
This is a summer pudding under another name, and it depends on two things: fruit juice thick enough to soak the bread, and enough weight and time to set the whole into a single mass.
- A gillIn British measure a gill is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml (the American gill is 4 fl oz). Whipped, it makes roughly a cup or more of cream, enough to cover the top of a small pudding.
- The basinA "plain pudding basin" is a plain, straight-sided or gently sloping ceramic bowl with no fluting to catch the bread. Something of about 1.5 pints suits this quantity; line it with plastic wrap first if you want a clean turn-out.
- The breadStale is not optional. A close-crumbed white loaf, a day or two old and crusts removed, absorbs juice and holds shape; fresh bread and modern soft sandwich loaves collapse into paste. Cut slices about a quarter-inch thick.
- CurrantsRed currants, not dried currants (which are small raisins). Fresh red currants are seasonal and often easier to find frozen; a pound is roughly 3 to 3.5 cups, stripped from the stalks.
- Cooking the fruitTen minutes over gentle heat with the sugar is enough to burst the currants and release a good deal of juice. No water is needed; the currants give plenty, and thin juice makes a soggy pudding.
- Setting timeFour hours under a weight is the minimum the recipe allows. Overnight in the refrigerator gives a firmer, more reliable turn-out, and the original's room-temperature standing is worth skipping.
- SugarFour ounces (half a cup) to a pound of red currants leaves the pudding distinctly sharp, which is the point of it. Taste the cooked fruit and add more if your currants are very tart.
- YieldServes four to six. Cut with a spoon rather than a knife, and pour any reserved juice over pale patches of bread before serving.
Bread-and-fruit puddings of this kind were a thrifty English answer to a glut of soft fruit and a stale loaf, and the type was known as hydropathic pudding, and later as summer pudding, names attached to versions that used no suet, flour or pastry. Red currants and raspberries are the classic pairing: the currants supply acidity and pectin-rich juice, the raspberries the perfume. The recipe's closing line about "various kinds of fruit in season" is the whole logic of the dish, which is less a fixed formula than a method for turning whatever the garden gives up into something that can be turned out on a plate.