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Log Cabin Pudding
1 loaf bread 1/4 cup molasses 1/4 cup honey 1/2 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup raisins Crumb the bread including the crusts. Pour over it the melted butter, distributing as evenly as possible, and stir in also the cleaned raisins. Mix the honey and molasses. An additional quarter cup of molasses may be substituted for the strained bee's honey. Add the milk. Turn the liquid over the dry ingredients; mix with a folding motion. Turn into a pudding dish, and steam over actively boiling water for about forty-five minutes. Too long cooking makes it heavy. Serve with sweet sauce.
A steamed bread pudding built on crumbs rather than slices, sweetened entirely with molasses and honey. The one thing to respect is the timing: forty-five minutes and no more, or the crumb tightens into something closer to a brick.
- The loaf is the ambiguous measure"1 loaf bread" is left undefined, and loaf sizes of the period varied; a 1 lb loaf would crumb to something in the region of 8 cups. Against that, 1/2 cup milk plus 1/2 cup sweeteners is very little liquid; work with a smaller loaf, or add milk by the spoonful until the crumbs are evenly damp but not soupy.
- Stale bread, crusts includedCrusts included -- The recipe has you crumb the crusts along with the rest, so don't trim them. Day-old or two-day-old bread crumbs cleanly; fresh bread gums up under the grater or in the processor.
- "Cleaned" raisinsRaisins then arrived loose and often stemmy, so they were picked over and rinsed. Modern packaged raisins need nothing, though a brief soak in hot water plumps them and keeps them from drawing moisture out of the pudding.
- Strained honey"Strained bee's honey" is simply liquid honey with the comb and debris filtered out — ordinary supermarket honey. The all-molasses version the recipe permits will be noticeably darker and more bitter; use unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap.
- How to steam itButter the pudding dish, cover it tightly with foil or a lid, and set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at an active boil and top it up with more boiling water as it drops.
- Why not to overcookThe warning is the recipe's own. A steam-set bread pudding goes on firming as it cooks, and past an hour the crumb turns dense. Test at forty minutes with a skewer — it should come out clean and the top should feel springy.
- Sweet sauceIn this period that means a thin vanilla pudding sauce or a hard sauce of creamed butter and powdered sugar. Either suits it; the pudding itself is dry enough that some sauce is not optional.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; choose a dish that the mixture fills by about three-quarters. It reheats well in a covered dish set back over steam.
Steamed puddings like this one belong to a long line of English bread and suet puddings adapted to the American pantry, where molasses did the work of sugar for two centuries because it was cheap and shipped well. The "log cabin" name is decorative rather than descriptive. Puddings of this kind were often made with chopped beef suet for richness, though steamed bread puddings using butter, as here, or no fat at all were common as well. The result is a dessert that costs almost nothing, uses up stale bread, and needs only a stovetop and a pot of boiling water — useful in a decade when many kitchens were economizing hard.