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Rhubarb Pudding
Butter thin slices of dry bread, lay in bottom of deep pudding pan, then a layer of rhubarb cut in small pieces; sprinkle with sugar, then another layer of buttered bread and so on until as deep as you wish, with a layer of bread on top. Cover closely and bake ½ hour. Serve cold with syrup of sugar, butter and a little water. CALUMET PON KE
A layered bread-and-fruit pudding of the thrifty sort, written for a cook who already knew what her oven and her rhubarb were doing. Two things are missing from the text: quantities and a temperature.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term at all. A covered fruit-and-bread pudding of this type will take a moderate oven, around 350F, as a modern starting point. Much higher and the sugar at the edges risks scorching before the rhubarb collapses.
- Half an hour is optimisticThirty minutes will soften the rhubarb but leave the bread in the middle dry. Reckon on 45 minutes to an hour covered, until the fruit has broken down and its juice has soaked through the layers, then uncover for the last 10 minutes if you want the top crisp.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For a 2-quart deep dish, about 1½ lb trimmed rhubarb, 6 to 8 slices of stale bread, and ¾ to 1 cup sugar distributed between the layers. Rhubarb is sharp enough that under-sugaring is the commoner mistake.
- Dry bread"Dry" here most likely means stale rather than toasted or oven-dried. A day-old plain white loaf works; anything enriched or sweet will go to paste. Butter one side only, generously.
- Cover closelyThe point of the lid is to trap steam so the bread absorbs the rhubarb juice rather than baking hard. Foil pressed over the rim does the job if the dish has no cover.
- Stalks onlyRhubarb leaves contain high levels of oxalic acid and are not eaten. Trim them off and discard; only the pink and green stalks go in the dish.
- The syrupSugar, butter and a little water, warmed together until smooth, is a simple butter syrup for pouring. About 1/2 cup sugar, 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp water, simmered a minute, is a reasonable reading.
- YieldA 2-quart dish serves six to eight. The instruction is to serve it cold; no reason is given.
- The trailing line"CALUMET PON KE" is not part of the method. It is a stray line picked up from the surrounding page, most likely the heading of an adjacent recipe, in a cookbook of the branded, commercially sponsored sort.
Rhubarb reached American kitchen gardens as a spring vegetable treated as a fruit, and nineteenth-century cooks knew it as "pie plant" for the obvious reason: it arrived in April, months before any real fruit, and it was tart enough to want a great deal of sugar. This pudding is the intersection of two household economies. One is that glut of early rhubarb, which had to be used as it came. The other is stale bread, which in a house that baked its own loaves was a constant and slightly reproachful presence. Layered bread puddings of exactly this kind, buttered slices alternating with sweetened fruit and baked under a cover, appear across English and American manuscript and community cookbooks throughout the century, sometimes as a charlotte, sometimes as a brown betty, sometimes with no name beyond the fruit involved. Books of the Reliable Recipes type, distributed with baking powder and other branded goods, gathered these contributions from local cooks and printed them close to the terse form in which they were submitted, which is why the quantities and the oven heat are simply assumed.