Mix 1 pint of soft bread-crumbs with ½ cup of seeded raisins, 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar and 2 eggs. Stir in 1 cup of milk and bake in a well-buttered pudding-dish until brown. Then boil 1½ cups of brown sugar with ½ cup of milk and 4 tablespoonfuls of chocolate. Stir until smooth and spread hot over the pudding.
A plain bread-and-raisin custard finished with a boiled sugar sauce. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no timing, which is where most of the guidance is needed.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. A dish of this size takes roughly 40 to 50 minutes, until the custard is set and the top browned; a knife slipped into the centre should come out clean rather than milky.
- The breadA pint of soft crumbs means fresh crumb torn or rubbed from a day-old loaf, loosely filling a 2-cup measure — not dry packaged crumbs, which would drink the milk and turn to paste. Let the mixture stand ten minutes before baking so the bread absorbs the custard evenly.
- Custard ratioTwo eggs to one cup of milk is the conventional custard proportion rather than a slack one, and with this much bread the mixture bakes dense rather than loose. If you want insurance against curdling, set the dish in a pan of hot water.
- "Chocolate" in 1900"Chocolate" here -- Most likely unsweetened block chocolate, grated or shaved; 4 tablespoons grated is roughly 1 to 1½ ounces. Cocoa powder is not a straight substitute at this ratio; use a chopped unsweetened bar.
- The sauce is the hingeBoiling 1½ cups brown sugar with only ½ cup milk drives it toward the soft-ball stage fast. Keep the heat moderate, stir constantly, and pull it off as soon as the chocolate has melted smooth. Overcooked, it sets to fudge on the pudding instead of pouring over it.
- Pudding-dishA 1½-quart baking dish, buttered heavily. The sauce is spread while hot on a pudding that is still warm, so serve the whole thing within a few minutes of assembly.
- Name versus methodNothing here is caramelised in the strict sense — the brown sugar supplies the caramel flavour. Expect a chocolate-fudge finish rather than a clear caramel.
- YieldServes four to six. The sauce is generous and sweet; a smaller spoonful per portion is usually enough.
Bread pudding is the oldest kind of household thrift dish, a way of turning stale loaf into a dessert with nothing more than milk, eggs and whatever dried fruit was in the cupboard, and it appears in English cookbooks from the seventeenth century onward and in American ones thereafter. What marks this version as turn-of-the-century is the topping: chocolate had become cheap and widely available in grated block form by the 1890s, and brown sugar boiled with milk into a fudge sauce was one way to dress up plain nursery puddings. The book's day-by-day, country-by-country format mthis one filed under "French," though the dish is not notably French muses national labels loosely, as decoration more than provenance.