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Brown-Bread Pudding
1/2 pound grated brown bread 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 pound currants 1/2 pound chopped suet 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg 2 eggs 1 tablespoon cream Mix the ingredients thoroughly and boil them in a buttered pudding mold or cloth for three hours. Serve with lemon sauce.
A steamed suet pudding of the plainest English type, and one that survives the trip forward intact provided the mold is covered and the water never stops simmering. The instruction that matters most is that the pudding is boiled in a sealed container, not baked: leave it open and the crumbs turn to sodden paste.
- "Grated brown bread"A wholemeal or rye-wheat loaf, day-old and rubbed on a grater into coarse crumbs; in American books of this date "brown bread" may also mean a steamed rye-and-cornmeal Boston brown bread, and the recipe does not say which. Half a pound is somewhere around 2 to 4 cups depending on how dry and how coarse the crumbs are; weigh rather than measure by volume.
- SuetHalf a pound of beef suet, finely chopped or grated while cold. Butchers will still sell it on request; shredded packaged suet works and needs no chopping. Frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Toss them with a spoonful of the crumbs so they do not sink to one end of the mold.
- "Boil them in a buttered pudding mold or cloth"Fill the buttered mold no more than two-thirds and cover it, buttered parchment and foil tied down with string being the convenient modern equivalent of a floured cloth. The original method was immersion in boiling water; standing the mold on a rack with boiling water halfway up the side is a modern adaptation that gives the same result. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- Three hoursThe timing is not padding. A dense suet batter needs long, gentle heat for the crumbs to swell and the suet to render; the pudding is done when a skewer comes out clean and the surface springs back.
- Lemon sauceThe recipe names it but does not give it. Two kinds were standard with such puddings: a stovetop sauce of sugar, a little cornstarch and boiling water finished with lemon juice, zest and butter off the heat; or a hard sauce of butter, powdered sugar and lemon.
- YieldThe mixture comes to appreciably more than a quart, so use a mold of about 1 1/2 to 2 quarts, filled two-thirds. It serves six to eight in the small wedges these puddings were meant to be cut into, and reheats well by steaming for 30 to 40 minutes.
Brown-bread pudding belongs to the long English line of boiled suet puddings that came to America and stayed on the dessert page well into the twentieth century. The formula is close to a plum pudding with breadcrumbs standing in for flour and currants in place of the raisins, citron and brandy of the Christmas dish; it is the everyday version. Recipes of this kind depended on stale bread being a resource rather than waste, and on suet being a cheap solid fat, both assumptions that faded once commercial shortening and sliced bread arrived. There is no leavening: the steam and the eggs do what lifting there is, and the result is close-textured rather than cakey.