An easy one, and just the thing to use up lots of ripe fruit.
You need some bread, half a loaf or so, commercial cotton bread if that’s all you have, and 4 – 6 cups of fruit. Your choice of raspberries, strawberries, blackberries (any variety), peaches, nectarines, plums, whatever. Skin the peaches, nectarines, plums. Frozen fruit is fine as well.
Take a large bowl/pudding basin, and line it with de-crusted slices of the bread, cut to fit like a jigsaw puzzle, in a single layer. Put all the fruit in a large saucepan with 1 cup sugar and 3 tbsp of lemon juice and bring to a gentle boil, then simmer a few minutes.
Pour a third of the fruit mixture into the bowl, and top with more bread slices, again cutting to fit in a single layer. Repeat twice more.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and cover with a pan that will fit inside the inner diameter of the bowl. A cake pan should work if you have the right size. Press it down firmly, add 2 pounds of weight to it (2 lbs rice or sugar in a bag is fine).
Refrigerate overnight, or up to 24 hours.
Remove the weight and pan, and unmold onto a plate. It may take some persuading: the recipe I used suggested lining the bowl with plastic first, but I didn’t need it.
Variations: for bread, substitute angel food cake or ladyfingers.
Adapted from The Joy of Cooking.