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Currant Pudding
1 pint currants 1 cup sugar 6 or 8 slices stale bread Stew fruit, boiling about five minutes. Add sugar just before taking off fire. Cut crusts from bread and fit slices neatly into bowl or dish from which the pudding will turn out well. Pour currants between and over slices, covering all parts of bread. Cover closely, set away in cool place.
Serve cold with cream and sugar.
This is a summer pudding under another name: stewed fruit soaked into stale bread and turned out cold. Two things decide whether it works — using the right currants, and weighting the bowl while it sets.
- Currants means fresh red currantsIn a book of this vintage an unqualified "currant" in a stewed-fruit pudding is almost certainly the fresh berry, not the dried Zante currant sold for fruitcake. A pint of fresh red or black currants is roughly 8 oz by weight; dried currants will not release the juice the pudding depends on.
- Barely any liquid neededCurrants are juicy enough to stew in their own moisture, though a few tablespoons of water keep them from catching before they break down. Five minutes at the boil, as directed, is right -- longer and they collapse to seedy jam.
- Sugar last, and taste itAdding sugar at the end is commonly said to keep the skins from toughening. A cup to a pint of fruit is on the sweet side by current taste; red currants are sharp, so start with three-quarters and adjust.
- The breadFirm white sandwich loaf, a day or two old, cut about 3/8 inch thick. Fresh bread turns to paste. Line the bowl with slices cut to fit so there are no gaps, and save enough for a lid on top.
- Weight itThe recipe says "cover closely" and leaves it there. Set a plate that just fits inside the rim on top of the pudding and stand a can or two on it. The pressure is what drives the juice through the bread and lets it turn out as a solid dome rather than a slump.
- "Cool place" means the refrigeratorIn its own day this would have meant a larder or an icebox. Overnight in the refrigerator, at least eight hours and preferably twelve, gives the juice time to reach the centre.
- Turning outLine the bowl with plastic wrap before the bread goes in and unmoulding becomes trivial. Any pale patch of bread can be painted with reserved juice, which is worth holding back a few spoonfuls for.
- YieldThe recipe's pint of fruit and 6 to 8 slices of bread want a bowl of about a quart, serving four to six. Cream and sugar, as directed, poured over.
Puddings built from stale bread and stewed soft fruit run through English and American cookery from the nineteenth century onward under a shifting set of names — hydropathic pudding, currant or raspberry pudding as here, and, from the later nineteenth century and after, summer pudding. The hydropathic label is generally traced to Victorian health spas, where suet crusts were off the menu and bread stood in for pastry, though the technique of lining a bowl with bread long predates any such dietary theory. Its appearance in a book devoted to left-overs is entirely to the point: the dish exists because stale bread and a glut of ripe currants arrive in the same household at the same season, and neither keeps. Red currants were a common kitchen-garden fruit in the period, grown far more widely in American backyards than they are now — cultivation was restricted in much of the United States in the early twentieth century because the plants host white pine blister rust, which is a large part of why the berry is unfamiliar to modern shoppers.