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Cherry Pudding
1 cup of fine sifted bread-crumbs 1 cup flour 4 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 cup pitted cherries 4 tablespoonfuls butter About ½ cup of milk or enough to make a soft dough ½ teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls bakingpowder 1 egg a Mix crumbs, flour, sugar, salt, and baking- Dowder together. Rub in the butter with spoon. Beat the egg until light, add the milk, and stir into the dry materials. Sprinkle the least bit of flour on the cherries and add them. Bake about half an hour. Serve hot with vanilla sauce.
A stiff cobbler-style batter stretched with dry bread, of the kind that turns a cup of leftover crumbs into dessert. The original gives neither oven temperature nor pan, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated; a half-hour bake for a soft dough of this size points to a moderate oven, 350-375F. Test with a skewer in the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square pan or a 1 1/2-quart baking dish, buttered, gives a layer about an inch deep. It serves six modestly.
- The crumbs"Fine sifted bread-crumbs" means dry crumbs from stale bread, pushed through a sieve, not the damp fresh crumbs of a food processor. The recipe leaves the milk open -- "about 1/2 cup or enough to make a soft dough" -- which matters because dry crumbs absorb liquid. If your crumbs are soft and fresh, start with a third of a cup of milk and add more only as needed.
- Judging the doughThis is the hinge. Aim for a thick drop batter that holds its shape on the spoon but is not stiff enough to roll. Too wet and the crumbs collapse to paste; too dry and the pudding bakes into a scone.
- Rubbing in the butterFour tablespoons of butter rubbed in with a spoon works best if the butter is soft rather than cold, since there is no lamination to protect here. Room-temperature butter creamed with the sugar first is an acceptable alternative.
- The cherriesSour (pie) cherries suit the sweet dough, their acidity balancing the sugar; sweet cherries work but taste flatter. The dusting of flour helps keep them from sinking. Drain canned or thawed frozen cherries thoroughly, or the extra juice throws off the milk measurement.
- Vanilla sauceThe book assumes you know it: a thin sweet sauce thickened with cornstarch, or a pouring custard, flavoured with vanilla. Either should be warm and loose enough to run into the pudding.
Stretching a sweet batter with stale bread-crumbs belongs to a broad tradition of household economy, in which crumbs served as coating, as a binder in puddings and stuffings, and, as here, as a partial substitute for flour. Nothing about this pudding is specifically regional; it belongs to the broad Anglo-American family of fruit puddings baked under or through a soft dough, close kin to cottage pudding and the cherry cobbler, and a sweet vanilla sauce was a common finish for plain baked puddings. That the recipe assumes the cook can improvise both the oven heat and the sauce without being told is itself a good measure of how much general skill such books took for granted.