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Cherry Pudding
H. N. Jenks.
A pint of bread crusts or soft crackers, scalded in a quart of boiling milk, piece of butter the size of an egg, one teaspoon of salt. three eggs, one and a-half teacups of sugar if eaten without sauce, and if with sauce a tablespoon of sugar; a pinch of pulverized cinnamon, and a quart of stoned cherries; bake quickly.
A bread-and-milk custard pudding stretched with a quart of cherries, written for a cook who already knew how puddings behave. A few of its measures and its one-word oven instruction need translating.
- "Bake quickly"Period usage generally puts a quick oven somewhere in the 400-450F range. That is hotter than a milk-and-egg custard wants; taken literally the edges may curdle before the centre sets. One modern approach is to start hot to set the top and drop to 350F, pulling the pudding when a knife an inch from the centre comes out clean, around 170-175F internally.
- A pint of bread crustsThis is a volume of dry crusts, perhaps 3-4 oz of stale bread torn small, or the same volume of broken crackers. Fresh soft bread will slump into paste.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is the standard nineteenth-century shorthand and does not need to be precise.
- TeacupsTeacup measures in American books of this date are not standardised; they are commonly reckoned at around two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup, though smaller values are given too. One and a half teacups of sugar is therefore roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups; err low, since the cherries bring their own sweetness.
- EggsEggs of this period are usually reckoned smaller than today's large, closer to a modern medium, though this varied. For a full quart of milk this is a lean custard either way, so it will be soft-set rather than sliceable.
- Stoned cherriesPitted. A quart is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb before pitting. Sour cherries were common in household use and suit the higher sugar quantity; sweet cherries with the full 1 1/2 teacups will be cloying.
- The sauce questionThe recipe gives two sugar levels because a pudding meant to be sauced is deliberately underswee: a tablespoon of sugar in the pudding, with the sweetness coming from a hard sauce, lemon sauce or plain cream poured over.
- Dish and yieldA quart of milk plus a quart of fruit needs a 3-quart baking dish with room to spare. It serves eight to ten, warm rather than hot.
Bread puddings like this one are the direct descendant of the household habit of never throwing out bread: dry crusts were saved in a crock, scalded soft in milk, bound with eggs and baked. What distinguishes the American versions collected in community cookbooks of the 1870s is the sheer volume of fruit, a quart of cherries to a quart of milk, which reflects cooks working through a glut from their own trees in the few weeks sour cherries are fit to pick. Such books commonly gathered their contents by name from contributing housewives, which is why this one carries H. N. Jenks's initials rather than a title of authorship.