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Hasty Huckleberry Pudding
Take four slices of cut bread that has not become dry. Butter the slices on both sides. Place one each in individual sauce-dishes. Grate a very little nutmeg on the top of each, and pour over enough warm, stewed huckleberries to moisten and well cover.
A four-ingredient assembly that depends entirely on the quality of the bread and the temperature of the fruit. Nothing is baked; the warm juice does the work.
- Get the fruit hot enoughGet the fruit warm enough -- the recipe calls for warm, not cold, stewed berries: warm enough to melt the butter and soak into the crumb rather than sit greasily on top.
- Huckleberries and blueberriesIn American cookbooks of this period "huckleberry" is used loosely for both true huckleberries (Gaylussacia) and wild blueberries. Cultivated blueberries work, though they are sweeter and less tart; a squeeze of lemon in the stewing pan compensates.
- Stewing the berriesThe recipe assumes you have leftover stewed fruit on hand. If not, simmer about 2 cups of berries with 2-3 tablespoons of sugar and a spoonful of water for five to eight minutes, until they burst and give up their juice.
- The bread"Cut bread that has not become dry" means fresh sliced bread, most likely the soft, close-crumbed white loaf standard at the time. A modern open-crumbed artisan loaf lets the juice run straight through.
- Butter on both sidesThe recipe gives no reason, but butter on the underside plausibly keeps the slice from dissolving into the pooled juice while the top layer melts into the fruit.
- Sauce-dishesSmall individual dishes of the kind sold in sets for sauce and stewed fruit; no capacity is specified. Any shallow dessert bowl serves.
- Nutmeg"a very little" is meant literally, perhaps two or three passes on a fine grater. Pre-ground nutmeg loses its aroma quickly, so judge by smell if that is what you have.
- Yield and servingServes four, one slice each. Serve at once, while the bread is soaked but still holding its shape, with cold cream poured over if you like.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a whole genre of early twentieth-century American household books built around the moral and economic case against waste, and this entry is the genre in miniature: yesterday's stewed fruit and today's bread, assembled in under five minutes and dignified with the name pudding. The technique is ancient and international — layering bread with sweetened fruit and letting the juice soak in is the same idea behind the English summer pudding — but here it is stripped of the overnight pressing and the mould, hence "hasty." Huckleberries appear constantly in these books because they were gathered wild in enormous quantities across the Northeast and Great Lakes states through the late summer and sold cheaply by the quart in city markets.