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Caramel Bread Pudding
3 cupfuls breadcrumbs 1 quart hot milk 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Grated nutmeg to taste 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful sugar 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco Whipped cream Put Crisco, crumbs, and salt into a basin, add hot milk and soak ten minutes. Melt sugar and brown it lightly in a small pan over fire, then add it to the bread, with eggs well beaten, and flavorings. Pour into Criscoed pudding dish and bake in moderate oven till firm. Serve with whipped cream.
A plain steamed-custard-style bread pudding given depth by dry-caramelised sugar rather than by molasses or dried fruit. The one thing to get right is the caramel: take it only to a light amber, because it keeps cooking off the heat and a scorched batch will make the whole quart of milk bitter.
- CriscoThis is from a shortening promotion, and the 4 tablespoons are simply fat for richness. Butter works in the same quantity and tastes better here; "Criscoed pudding dish" just means greased.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 325-350F today. A hotter oven curdles an egg custard of this proportion before the centre sets.
- BreadcrumbsSoft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which are far denser by volume and will drink the milk into paste. Three cupfuls of soft crumbs is roughly 4 to 5 oz of bread.
- Adding the caramelPouring molten sugar into the milk-soaked crumbs will spit and may seize into hard lumps. Add it in a thin stream while stirring, then keep stirring until the sugar has dissolved into the warm mixture.
- Egg ratioTwo eggs to a quart of milk is a loose set by modern standards; the crumbs do most of the binding. If you want a sliceable pudding rather than a spoonable one, three or four eggs is closer to current practice.
- Time and doneness"Till firm" is about 45 to 60 minutes in a buttered 2-quart dish. It is done when the centre barely trembles and a knife inserted an inch from the middle comes out clean, around 175F. A water bath is worth the trouble at this milk-to-egg ratio.
- FlavouringsA teaspoonful of lemon extract is assertive with modern extracts; half that, or the grated zest of a lemon, sits better with the caramel. Grate the nutmeg fresh.
- YieldA quart of milk plus crumbs fills a 2-quart dish and serves six to eight.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to the wave of cookbooks published by manufacturers in the 1910s and 1920s to teach cooks what to do with a new product — in this case Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, which appears in nearly every recipe in the book whether or not the dish needs it. The pudding underneath the branding is much older: bread puddings were the standard English and American way of using stale loaves, and the caramel version — sugar melted dry to amber and stirred into the custard — was generally known in nineteenth-century cookery as a "burnt sugar" or "caramel" flavouring, the same technique that colours gravies and browns commercial caramel colouring. Serving it with whipped cream rather than a boiled sauce marks it as a somewhat genteel version of a thrift dish.