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Peasant Girl with a Veil
2 cups dried crums
1 cup tart jam
Whipped cream
This is a delicious Danish pudding. Crumble bits of graham or rye bread to make fine crums. Add a little sugar to the crums and heat them in slow oven until they are very dry. Cool and mix with any kind of jam, preferably a tart jam like apricot or plum. Mold, chill and serve with whipped cream.
A no-cook layered pudding that lives or dies on how dry the crumbs are. Everything else is assembly.
- Dry the crumbs properlyThis is the hinge. Spread the crumbs in a thin layer and bake in a slow oven, around 275-300F, stirring from time to time, until they are sandy and crisp all the way through. Crumbs with any residual moisture turn to paste once the jam goes in.
- "Slow oven"Roughly 250-300F in period usage. The point is dehydration, not colour; if the crumbs are browning fast the oven is too hot.
- The bread mattersA dense wholemeal or a real sour rye gives the malty, faintly sour note the dish depends on. Sliced sandwich bread and commercial graham crackers are both too sweet and too soft. Dark Danish rugbrød is the traditional choice.
- Sugar in the crumbs"A little" means roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons for 2 cups of crumbs, depending on the sweetness of the jam. Some cooks toast the crumbs in a spoonful of butter as well, which keeps them crisper against the fruit.
- "Mold" means layer"Mold" -- the recipe has you mix the dried crumbs into the jam, then press the mixture into a mold and chill it, with the whipped cream spread over the top as the "veil." Chill an hour or two -- long enough to set, not long enough for the crumbs to soften completely.
- Jam consistencyA stiff jam will not work through dry crumbs. Slacken it with a spoonful of water or lemon juice, or use a thick apple compote, the traditional Danish filling.
- YieldAbout four servings. It does not keep; make it the day it is eaten.
This is the Danish bondepige med slør -- literally "peasant girl with a veil," the veil being the layer of whipped cream over the dark crumbs. It belongs to a large northern European family of thrift puddings built on stale bread: dense rye loaves went hard rather than mouldy, and toasting the crumbs with sugar turned yesterday's bread into something closer to a praline. Apple compote is the usual fruit layer in Denmark, so the direction here to use apricot or plum jam reads as an adaptation for cooks with a well-stocked preserve shelf and no barrel of windfall apples.