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Currant Pudding
Mrs. Bartlett.
Slice a baker's loaf, add butter, stew and sweeten three pints of currants, turn over the bread, and set away until cold. Serve without sauce; slice the bread thin.
This is a summer pudding in all but name: sweetened stewed fruit soaked into sliced bread and chilled until it sets into a sliceable mass. The whole success of it rests on using enough juice to saturate every piece of bread.
- Which currantsThese are fresh red or white currants on the stem, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. Three pints is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of fruit; blackcurrants, or a mix of currants and raspberries, will also work.
- Stewing and sweeteningCook the currants with about 1 to 1 1/4 cups sugar and a splash of water only until the skins burst and the juice runs freely, five to eight minutes. Currants are sharp and pectin-rich, so taste rather than trusting a fixed amount, and stop before the juice reduces — the liquid is what sets the pudding.
- A baker's loafA plain white commercial loaf with a firm, close crumb, a day old. Modern soft sandwich bread turns to paste; brioche and sourdough are both wrong here. Trim the crusts.
- "Slice the bread thin"This is the instruction that matters. Thin slices, about 1/4 inch, absorb the juice all the way through; thick ones stay dry in the middle and the pudding will not hold together when cut.
- The butterThe recipe says only "add butter". Butter the slices lightly on one side; buttered bread holds up better against the juice and helps the pudding turn out cleanly, though the recipe does not say where the butter goes.
- AssemblingThe recipe says only to turn the stewed fruit over the bread. If you want the lined-basin method, use a bowl big enough to take three pints of fruit plus the bread — two quarts or more — alternating layers of fruit and bread, finishing with bread, and pouring any reserved juice over pale patches until no white shows.
- "Set away until cold"Cover and chill several hours or overnight. Weighting the pudding with a plate that fits inside the rim and a can or two is a later refinement rather than anything this recipe asks for, but it does help the layers bond.
- ServingThe direction to serve without sauce is deliberate — the fruit juice is the sauce. Turn it out onto a plate and cut in wedges; the quantity will serve six to eight. Cream alongside is a common accompaniment for puddings of this sort, but it goes against the recipe's own instruction.
Bread-and-fruit puddings of this kind were a standing summer economy in English and American kitchens: bread past its best, fruit at its glut, and no oven lit in July. The dish is now generally known as summer pudding, though that name only became common in Britain later; nineteenth-century cookbooks list versions under the fruit involved, as here. Currants earned their place because currant bushes were among the most reliable things in a northern kitchen garden, cropping heavily in a short midsummer window and too tart to eat out of hand, which pushed them toward jellies, shrubs and puddings like this one. The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women — Mrs. Bartlett here — and sold for charity, so what survives in it is essentially a record of what particular households actually put on the table rather than a professional cook's ideal.