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Quaker Pudding
Lay slices of light bread, cut thin and spread with butter, in a pudding-dish, alternating the layers of bread with raisins until near the top. Beat five eggs up well, and add to them a quart of milk, salted and spiced according to taste. Pour this liquid over the contents of the dish. Bake the pudding half an hour, and eat with sweet sauce. It will be necessary to boil the raisins in a very little water so as to make them tender, and add the water with the rest.
A plain bread-and-custard pudding with no sugar in the batter at all — the sweetness is meant to arrive in the sauce poured over at table. A few points on the custard and the bake.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven temperature at all. Half an hour is optimistic for five eggs and a quart of milk in a deep dish: expect 45 to 60 minutes in a moderate oven (around 350F), and judge by the custard rather than the clock.
- Knowing when it is setThe pudding is done when a knife slipped into the centre comes out clean and the surface no longer ripples when the dish is nudged. Custard that boils will weep and curdle, so pull it while the very centre still has a slight wobble.
- A water bath helpsStanding the dish in a roasting pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides keeps the edges from setting into rubber before the middle cooks. Not in the original, but it makes the difference between silky and grainy.
- "Light bread"Ordinary yeast-risen white loaf, as distinct from the soda breads and corn breads of the same era. A day-old sandwich loaf or a plain white sourdough works; anything enriched and sweet will fight the sauce.
- Soaking timeGive the assembled dish 20 to 30 minutes to stand before it goes in, so the bread drinks the custard. Bread put straight into the oven floats and bakes dry on top.
- Salt and spice "to taste"Read this as roughly a quarter teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg or cinnamon, and a splash of vanilla if you want it. The batter itself is unsweetened by design.
- The raisin waterSimmering the raisins briefly and tipping the liquid into the custard is easy to overlook, and worth doing. Dry raisins pull moisture out of the custard around them and leave hard beads; the cooking water also carries sweetness and colour into the mix.
- Sweet saucePeriod sweet sauces for puddings are commonly a hard sauce (creamed butter and powdered sugar) or a butter-and-sugar sauce thinned with cream, sometimes with brandy or lemon. Something is needed — the pudding is bland eaten alone.
- Yield and dishA quart of milk, five eggs and enough bread to reach near the top of the dish fills a 2- to 2.5-quart baking dish and serves six to eight.
Bread puddings of this kind were the standard use for a stale loaf in nineteenth-century American households, and turn up in nearly every general cookbook of the period under a dozen local names. The "Quaker" label attached itself to a good many plain, thrifty, unornamented dishes in the same era \\\— Quaker bonnet rolls and Quaker cake among them \\\— less as a record of Quaker authorship than as a byword for economy and restraint, and that is generally how it should be read here. The recipe's most telling detail is the unsweetened batter: the sweetness comes from a small quantity of sauce spooned over each serving rather than being dispersed through a quart of milk, which gave the cook a way to dress up a dish assembled from leftovers.