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Boston Pudding
Cut 1 loaf bread into thin slices and spread with Crisco. Crisco baking dish, put into it layer bread, sprinkle over 1 tablespoon each cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg, then a layer seeded raisins, and so on till dish is full. Pour over 1 quart milk sweetened to taste, with 3 well beaten eggs, allow to soak 4 hours, then add 2 cups more milk sweetened to taste. Cover dish and bake in moderate oven 3 hours. Serve with wine sauce.
A thrifty bread-and-custard pudding of the sort every household cookbook carried, here rewritten to sell shortening. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what a bread pudding should look like, so a few numbers need pinning down.
- The spices are for the whole dish, not each layerOne tablespoon each of cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg is a quarter-cup of ground spice in one pudding. Read the tablespoon as the total to be divided among all the layers, and even then clove and ginger at that strength will dominate — half those amounts is closer to modern taste.
- CriscoStill sold, and the recipe is essentially an advertisement for it. Butter spread on the bread gives a better pudding; use butter to grease the dish as well.
- Moderate oven350F. At that heat three hours is far longer than a custard of this size needs; 325F for about an hour and a quarter, until the centre is just set and no longer soupy, is the safer reading. Custard baked hard for three hours will weep and curdle.
- Total liquidOne quart of milk goes in before the soak and two cups after, so six cups of milk to three eggs. That is a very loose custard by modern standards — it sets soft and spoonable rather than sliceable. Five or six eggs give a firmer pudding if you want one.
- The four-hour soakThis is the hinge. Cheap sliced bread collapses to paste long before four hours; use a firm white loaf, preferably a day or two old, and check that the slices still hold their shape. In the refrigerator, not on the counter, since this is raw egg and milk sitting for four hours.
- Covered bakingThe lid keeps the top from setting into a crust. If you prefer a browned surface, uncover for the last fifteen minutes.
- Wine sauceThe period standard is a thin sweet sauce of butter, sugar, and sherry or Madeira, sometimes thickened with a little flour or bound with egg. Hard sauce or plain cream serves as well.
- YieldA loaf of bread and six cups of milk fills a large baking dish and serves eight to ten.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company launched in 1911; that is why a bread pudding calls for shortening spread on bread where any older cookbook would have said butter. The pudding itself is older than the book and older than the brand — layered stale bread, dried fruit, sweetened milk and egg is the standard English bread-and-butter pudding, a way of using up a stale loaf that crossed to America with the colonists. Why New England claimed this particular version is unclear; "Boston" attached itself freely to nineteenth-century American dishes, often, by impression at least, signalling nothing more precise than heavy spicing, molasses or brown bread. The heavy hand with cloves and ginger here belongs to the same taste that produced Boston brown bread and Indian pudding.