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Simple Fruit Puddings
Stew currants, or any small fruits, fresh or dried, with sugar to taste, and pour hot over thin slices of baker's bread with crust cut off, making alternate layers of fruit and bread, and leaving a thick layer of fruit for the last. Put a plate on top, and when cool set on ice; serve with sifted sugar, or cream and sugar. This pudding is delicious made with Boston or milk crackers, split open, and stewed apricots or peaches, with plenty of juice, arranged as above. Or another way is to toast and butter slices of bread, pour over it hot stewed fruit in alternate layers, and serve warm with rich hot sauce. - Mrs. L. S. W.
An unbaked pudding that depends entirely on having enough hot syrup to soak every layer through. The method is closer to English summer pudding than to anything baked.
- The hinge: soak, don't drizzleStew the fruit with enough water that it finishes swimming in juice, not jammy. Bread that stays dry in the middle will collapse into a dry crumb layer when you cut it, and no amount of chilling will fix it.
- Baker's breadMeans a loaf bought from a bakery rather than baked at home; in practice a plain white commercial loaf. A firm sandwich white works; airy modern brioche or very open sourdough falls apart in the juice. The recipe specifies only that the slices be thin and the crust cut off.
- Boston and milk crackersBoth were large, thick, mild plain crackers, split open before use as the recipe directs; the milk cracker took its name from being made with milk. Common crackers or plain water biscuits are the nearest thing on a current shelf; ordinary thin saltines dissolve.
- Set on iceRefrigerate. The recipe gives no time; several hours, or overnight, will let the juice work through to the centre so the pudding holds a cut edge.
- The plate on topProbably meant as a light press rather than simply a cover, though the recipe specifies no weight. A plate that just fits inside the rim of the dish, weighted, will do more to turn loose layers into a sliceable pudding.
- Dried fruitDried currants, apricots or peaches are usually soaked before stewing and need more water than fresh; the recipe leaves sugar to taste. Stew until plump and surrounded by syrup.
- Sifted sugarPowdered or icing sugar shaken through a sieve over the top at the table. Caster sugar does the same job with less cloud.
- YieldNo quantities are given. As a rough guide, a quart dish built from six to eight slices of bread and something over a pound of fruit would serve about six. The warm version, with toast and hot sauce, should be assembled just before serving rather than pressed and chilled.
This belongs to the same family as the English summer pudding: cooked fruit and bread layered and weighted until the bread takes up the juice, requiring no oven and no eggs. The technique is old and thrifty, a way of using both a surplus of soft fruit and bread past its best, and versions circulated under many names through nineteenth-century cookbooks. The cracker variant is a characteristically American touch. Boston crackers and milk crackers were manufactured goods sold by the barrel and kept in the pantry, and cooks did substitute them for bread in puddings and other dishes. The recipe's three-way structure, cold with cream, cold with cracker layers, or warm with a hot sauce, is typical of contributed recipes of this kind, where a signature such as Mrs. L. S. W. stood in for a family's own way of doing a common thing.