Home › Left-Over Bread › Spiced Graham Pudding
Spiced Graham Pudding
Take half a loaf of stale graham bread before it gets very dry, and cut off all the hard crust. Press seeded raisins well into the bread to cover the entire surface. Make a custard mixture of two cups of cold milk, two eggs, four tablespoonfuls of sugar, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one teaspoonful mixed spices, and one-quarter teaspoonful nutmeg. Mix the sugar, salt, and spices together and add them to the beaten eggs. Pour in the milk. Soak the bread in this until it entirely absorbs it, turning occasionally so all sides are moistened. Put into a buttered pudding-mold or tightly covered pail, and steam one hour. Serve with maple sauce.
A steamed bread pudding built around a half loaf kept whole rather than cubed, so the raisins stay pressed into the crumb. The custard has to be fully absorbed before steaming or the pudding steams into two layers.
- Graham breadGraham bread is a coarse whole-wheat loaf, unsifted and often lightly sweetened with molasses. A dense whole-wheat sandwich loaf is the closest supermarket substitute; avoid anything soft and enriched, which will collapse into paste.
- Half a loafLoaf sizes were not standardised in this period. Aim for roughly 8 oz of trimmed crumb, which should be about what 2 cups of milk and 2 eggs will saturate without pooling.
- Mixed spicesA period "mixed spice" is mostly cinnamon and allspice with a little clove and ginger. Any pumpkin-pie or mixed-spice blend works; the recipe calls for the nutmeg separately, on top of the blend.
- Let it soak fullyThis is the hinge. The bread must absorb every bit of the custard before it goes into the mold, which may take 20-30 minutes with turning for a dense whole-wheat loaf. Any free liquid in the mold will set as a separate weeping layer.
- The moldA 1-quart pudding basin, a coffee can, or any straight-sided metal container works. Butter it well, cover tightly with a lid or with foil tied down, and leave about an inch of headroom for rise.
- Steaming setupSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up its sides, cover, and keep the water at a bare simmer, topping up as needed. One hour is right; the pudding is done when a skewer to the center comes out clean and the custard is set rather than milky.
- Maple sauceA simple pouring sauce is all that is wanted: maple syrup thickened with a little butter and cornstarch, or maple syrup beaten into cream. Warm maple syrup alone is entirely in keeping.
- YieldServes four to six, best turned out warm. Leftovers reheat by steaming again for 15 minutes rather than in the oven, which dries the crumb.
Graham bread takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who campaigned for coarse unsifted wheat flour against the fashionable white loaf; by the time this book was written "graham" was simply the grocer's word for whole-wheat baking, and graham flour and graham crackers both outlived his reputation. The recipe itself belongs to the older tradition of the steamed pudding, cooked in a covered mold over water on a stovetop rather than in an oven, which suited kitchens where oven heat was expensive and unevenly controlled. Thrift is the point: stale bread, milk and a couple of eggs were the cheapest possible dessert, and pressing raisins into an intact half loaf rather than cutting it up let a thrifty cook present something that looked deliberate instead of salvaged.