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Chocolate Bread Pudding
One quart milk, ten tablespoons bread crumbs, yolks of six eggs well beaten with one cup of coffee sugar, flavor with vanilla, sprinkle six tablespoons of chocolate on the top, bake slowly one hour.. When done make a soufla of the whites of the eggs and one-half cup pulverized sugar, spread on top and brown a little. A sauce is not necessary with this pudding though some eat sweetened cream with it.
A baked custard stiffened with breadcrumbs rather than a soaked-bread pudding, finished with a meringue. The whole thing hinges on keeping the oven low enough that the egg yolks set without curdling.
- "Bake slowly"Read this as 300-325F. The custard is done when a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean and the centre still wobbles slightly; an instant-read thermometer should show 170-175F. A water bath is not called for but makes the low, even heat much easier to hold.
- Coffee sugarA coarse-crystal sugar sold in the period for sweetening coffee, often off-white or pale yellow. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, one cup.
- The chocolateHere this means plain unsweetened cake chocolate, grated. Six tablespoons grated is roughly 1.5 oz. Sprinkling it on top as directed gives a dark layer over pale custard; stirring it into the warm milk instead gives an evenly brown pudding, which is closer to what most people now expect.
- "Soufla"A phonetic spelling of soufflé, here meaning a plain meringue: the six whites beaten to soft peaks with half a cup of confectioners' sugar. Spread it to the edges of the dish so it seals and does not shrink, and brown it 8-10 minutes at 350F, or a couple of minutes under a broiler if you watch it continuously.
- BreadcrumbsSoft crumbs from the inside of a day-old loaf, not dry commercial crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and will make the pudding pasty. Ten tablespoons is five-eighths of a cup.
- Pulverized sugarFinely ground sugar; confectioners' or icing sugar is the nearest modern equivalent. It dissolves into the whites readily, where undissolved granulated sugar is more likely to bead or weep.
- Dish and yieldA 1.5- to 2-quart baking dish, buttered. Serves six to eight. Best warm or at room temperature; the meringue turns leathery after a night in the refrigerator.
- Leftover whites and yolksThe recipe uses all six of both, unusually tidy for the period. If you scale it down, remember the meringue needs its whites in the same proportion or it will not cover the surface.
Bread puddings began as thrift, a way to use stale loaf ends, but by the later nineteenth century the better ones had drifted toward custard with only a token quantity of crumbs for body — which is exactly what this is. The chocolate marks it as a comparatively modern dessert for such a book: cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s add it freely to puddings, pies and blancmanges that had previously been plain or lemon-flavoured. The meringue lid, called here by a garbled "soufla," was a common finish for a domestic baked pudding in this era, doing the work that whipped cream or a poured sauce does now — hence the author's remark that no sauce is needed, though sweetened cream was clearly a common indulgence.