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Berry Pudding
1 quart bread crumbs 1 pint milk Pinch of salt 2 eggs 1 quart berries Soak the broken bread crumbs in the milk; add the eggs well beaten, the salt and the berries, washed and drained. Steam in a buttered mold for three hours and serve with either hard sauce or fruit sauce.
A plain steamed bread pudding of the old economical sort: no sugar in the batter at all, since the sweetness is meant to arrive with the sauce. A few notes on measures and method.
- The bread"Bread crumbs" here means stale bread torn or broken into rough pieces, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. A quart is about 4 cups loosely packed, roughly 6 to 8 ounces of day-old white bread. Packaged dry crumbs will drink the milk and turn the pudding pasty.
- Quart and pintA quart of berries is a dry quart, a little larger than a liquid quart, so 4 cups and a bit, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 1/4 lb of blackberries, blueberries or huckleberries. The pint of milk is 2 cups. Frozen berries work but should be thawed and drained hard, or the pudding will weep.
- No sugar in the batterThat is deliberate, not an omission. If you intend to serve it without a sauce, add 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar to the soaked crumbs, otherwise it eats as bland as it reads.
- The mold and the steamerA one-and-a-half to two quart pudding basin or covered mold, buttered well, filled no more than three-quarters. Cover tightly with a lid or buttered foil tied down, set on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water as it falls.
- Three hours is generousThree hours allows for a large mold and slow, uneven heat. In a two-quart mold it may well be set sooner, nearer 2 hours; test by inserting a skewer into the center, which should come out clean, and the pudding should feel springy. Overcooking mainly costs you moisture rather than ruining it.
- The saucesHard sauce is creamed butter beaten with powdered sugar and a little vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, served cold so it melts over the hot pudding. Fruit sauce would be berries cooked down with sugar and a spoonful of water, strained or not as you like.
- YieldEight servings. It unmolds best after resting 10 minutes off the heat, and leftovers reheat well by steaming a further 20 minutes.
Steamed bread puddings of this kind sat at the thrifty end of the dessert chapter in many American and British household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: stale bread, milk, eggs and whatever fruit was in season, cooked over a pot of water rather than in an oven that cost fuel to heat and might not hold its temperature. The berries would have been whatever the region gave up in summer, huckleberries and blackberries as often as blueberries, and the recipe is written to accept any of them without comment. The division of labor between an unsweetened pudding and a sweet sauce is characteristic of the era. Mrs. Fryer's book, issued in loose-leaf form, belongs to the period when domestic-science instruction was pushing standardized measures into home kitchens, though quart-of-bread-crumbs measurements like this one show how much of the older, looser practice survived.