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Date Pudding
8 ounces of stoned dates 1 gill of milk 8 ounces bread or rusk crumbs 2 ounces butter 1 ounce sugar Clean, and stone the dates, and cut them into four; make the milk hot; put the butter in the milk, and pour it over the bread crumbs; let it stand for five minutes; then add the dates, mix well, and steam for three and a half hours. Serve with sweet sauce.
A plain steamed bread pudding of the thrifty sort, held together by nothing but softened crumbs and butter. A few of its measures and its very long steaming need translating.
- A gillQuarter of a pint: 5 fl oz in British books, 4 fl oz (half a cup) in American ones. Either way it is a scant amount of liquid for 8 oz of crumbs, and the mixture should be moistened to the point of clumping, not soupy.
- Rusk crumbsRusk is bread dried and re-baked hard, then crushed; it drinks up more milk than fresh crumbs. If you use fresh soft breadcrumbs, hold back a little of the milk; if you use dried crumbs or zwieback, expect to add a spoonful or two more.
- Weights, not cups8 oz of crumbs is roughly 4 cups fresh and loosely packed, or about 2 cups dried and fine. Weigh if you can, since the crumb-to-milk ratio is the whole structure of this pudding.
- The datesStoned means pitted. Deglet Noor cut in four gives distinct pieces; Medjool are softer and sweeter and will melt into the crumb. Pre-pitted dates still hide the occasional stone, so check them.
- Steaming timeThree and a half hours is generous; the recipe does not say what size basin is intended, and these quantities will fill only a smallish one, which may well be done sooner. Test with a skewer, which should come out clean and hot. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- Covering the basinButter the basin, then cover with pleated parchment or foil tied down, so condensation cannot drip in and the pudding has room to rise slightly.
- No egg, no raisingThere is neither egg nor leavening here, so the result is dense and sliceable rather than light. Do not expect it to set like a custard pudding, and do not be alarmed that it stays close-textured.
- Sweet sauceThe recipe does not say which. Sauces of the period that would suit include a hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and a little brandy or vanilla), a thin vanilla custard, or a cornflour sauce sweetened and flavoured with lemon.
- YieldServes about six as written. It reheats well by steaming a further 20 to 30 minutes.
Steamed puddings built on breadcrumbs were the standard economical sweet of British and American households well into the twentieth century, a way of using stale loaf ends and of cooking a dessert on the stovetop when the oven was cold or in use. Dates made the sweetness: cheap, sugary, imported dried by the box from North Africa and the Persian Gulf, they were one of the few fruits that a household could keep on the shelf year round and that needed no sugar-heavy preserving. A collection called Meatless Cookery belongs to a moment when meat-free eating is often said to have been argued for on grounds of economy, digestion and wartime conservation as much as principle, and a pudding of crumbs, milk, butter and fruit answered all of those at once.