Home › Recipes › Baked Cracked Wheat Pudding

Baked Cracked Wheat Pudding

2 heaping quarts of cracked wheat, already well cooked and dry. 6 ounces of butter. 1/2 pound of sugar. 3 pints of milk. 5 eggs (or 8 yolks). Cinnamon extract or grated nutmeg.

The cracked wheat must be dry, else use a pint less milk. Thoroughly mix all, the butter first while the wheat is hot. Bake in two buttered pans about half an hour. Vanilla transparent sauce or almost any other kind. Brown Cracked Wheat Pudding. West Point Pudding. Graham Pudding. 2 heaping quarts of cracked wheat mush. 1/2 pound of molasses (a small cup). 6 ounces of butter or chopped suet. 6 eggs. 1 1/2 pints of milk. 1 teaspoonful of ground cinnamon. 1/2 pound of raisins.

Mix and beat all the ingredients together, except raisins, the beaten eggs to be added last. Strew the raisins on top in the pans; they sink if stirred in. Bake an hour. Maple syrup with butter for sauce.

One large pint of cracked wheat raw will make the above amount. The mush is expected to be dry, else use less milk or more eggs. The pudding has to be apparently quite fluid when put in the oven but comes out firm enough. When either of the preceding puddings are to be made, extra wheat should be put on for the breakfast mush, to secure the benefit of the three hours cooking. When the mush happens to be cold, mash it with the milk made hot, so as to have no lumps. Those are favorite puddings and worth attention. Speaking of those titled personages brings to mind the Marchioness. Dickens' Marchioness and Dick Swiveller. We have particular business with Dick Swiveller, for he must have been the author and originator of the word duff, as applied to pudding. Else whence comes duff? It is a word severely let alone by many people under the impression that it is slang; but slang is evanescent, this word is stable and permanent. It cannot be even a vulgarism, for it permeates all through H. B. M's. most respect able army and navy as well as the U.S's. Midshipman Easy undoubtedly used the word duff for pudding, and the entire crew of H. M. S. Pinafore follow the same practice. It is simply a cockneyism, and cockneyisms extend all over the world. So the Greenwich pensioners and the Chelsea pensioners; the Woolwich dock yard hands; the sailors on the high seas; the blue-coat children of charity marching down the streets and thoroughfares which Dickens has made familiar, all have their duff days--suet duff, currant duff, plain duff, plum duff Great days are the days marked by plum duff! But they are not all. Thousands of factory operatives, thousands of railroad constructors of British, Canadian, Australian and American railways all own a loving allegiance to King Duff! Now who will presume to laugh at Duff, with such a following, a new Jack Cade though he may be? We shall do far better to discuss his merits, as the following pages are intended, not only Duff proper but his family and followers. But being but a new-comer, comparatively, taking the place of old pudding, whence came the word. Did not some smallwit, such as we see in Thackeray's barrooms in the Newcomes, pretending the pudding was not cooked enough, call for more dough? And did not another smallwit say if e-n-o-u-g-h spelt enuff, d-o-u-g-h spelt duff? and they had had enuff duff. But this would never have gone abroad if Dick Swiveller had not been there. He was a little stage struck and very popular at his boarding house. He had taken the Marchioness to the theatre the night before, and on that day they took a sumptuous dinner at a London cheap boarding house. So when it came to calling for the pudding he remembered the smallwits and shouted to the waiter. "Lay on, Mack--Duff, and dumb be he that first cries, hold, enough!" Poor Dick ! he is gone now. But duff is all over the world. In the copper mines of Lake Superior, and in the carbonate mines of the Rocky Mountains, they call for duff as glibly as on board the Alaska whalers; and in all those places all our fine puddings would be called duff just the same. Infantine pudd'n; feminine pudding; masculine duff.

But "Quantum suf Ficit of duff."

Yet here he comes. Shake him heartily. He is no popinjay "perfumed like a milliner," with flummeries, frills and furbelows. He is an athlete in athletic garb; not now in fighting trim, but mellow with doing good; his countenance shining and his sides shaking with fatness. Is he rough and plain? But think how he goes into the convalescent wards; the workhouses; the almshouses, the veteran retreats, the charity schools, the penitentiaries, the very hulks, and they all smile to see him come. And what might not happen in barracks army and navy training schools in camp and on the sea were the regular weekly visits of this potentate arbitrarily forbidden? Athlete, did we say? Why, bless us, "things are not what they seem;" how do we know but he is an Atlas, and on his shoulders he is bearing up empires?

If you had not been forewarned to treat him knightly, you might not have suspected that this following is King Duff.