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Huckleberry Pudding
Mrs. Bartlett.
One brick loaf, wet it with boiling milk, say one pint, four eggs, little salt, and one quart of berries. Boil one and a-half hours. Serve with wine sauce.
A boiled bread-and-berry pudding of the plainest sort, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you knew what a pudding mould was. The quantities work out once you translate the loaf.
- "One brick loaf"A brick loaf is simply a loaf baked in a rectangular tin; period examples ran to about a pound or more, so treat the quantity as approximate. Stale is better than fresh; broken up, a pound of it gives something in the region of 6 to 8 cups of soft crumbs. The pint of boiling milk (2 cups) is poured over and left to stand until the bread collapses into a paste.
- "Boil" means steam"Boil" -- Period boiled puddings were either tied in a floured pudding cloth and lowered into boiling water or packed into a buttered mould or basin and set in a pot. For the mould method, cover with a lid or with pleated foil tied down and set in a pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the side. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water as it drops.
- A quart of berriesAbout 4 cups, roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb. True huckleberries are wild-gathered and carry harder, more noticeable seeds; cultivated blueberries are the usual substitute and behave much the same in the mould. Toss them with a spoonful of the crumbs so they do not all sink.
- No sugar in the puddingUnsweetened batters served with a sweet sauce are common in period puddings, so the absence may well be intended rather than an oversight, though the recipe gives no indication. If you want the pudding itself sweet, 1/3 cup of sugar in the milk will not upset the structure.
- Timing and donenessAn hour and a half suits a deep mould of two to three quarts; a wider, shallower dish will be done sooner. A skewer into the centre should come out clean of batter, and the pudding should pull very slightly from the sides. Let it stand five minutes before turning out or it will slump.
- Wine sauceOne common period form is butter, sugar and a beaten egg or two warmed together until thick, then loosened with sherry or Madeira off the heat; others are simply butter, sugar and wine without egg. If egg is used it must not boil after it goes in. Something like a quarter cup of wine to a cup of sauce is a workable proportion.
- YieldServes eight generously. Leftovers slice cleanly when cold and fry well in butter the next morning.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, first published 1874, with later printings through the 1870s) was assembled from recipes contributed by named local women and sold for the benefit of a charitable home, which is why entries arrive credited to a Mrs. Bartlett and written as one cook would speak to another rather than as a professional would instruct a novice. The dish itself belongs to the long family of boiled bread puddings, a standard use for a stale loaf. Huckleberries were gathered wild across the northern states and were a seasonal glut item, cheap or free, and berry puddings of this kind appear all through mid-century household books. The wine sauce may be a sign that this was company food: the pudding costs almost nothing, but the sauce takes a splash of sherry.