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Bread, Broken, Pudding
This pudding will use up the crusts and remnants of bread to be found in every household; all will suit, no matter how dry they are, so that they are not mouldy. Gather all into a large bowl, and throw over it as much sweetened milk as the bread is likely to absorb, with two or three table-spoonfuls of finely-shredded suet, and a little salt. Cover until well soaked, then beat the whole smooth, and add two or three well-beaten eggs, a few currants and raisins, and some grated nutmeg. The addition of a table-spoonful of rum will be found an improvement. Bake in an ordinary pudding-dish for about an hour and a half.
A frugal steamer-less bread pudding written for cooks who measured by eye. The proportions are left open, so the useful work is in fixing the ratios and the oven, neither of which the original gives.
- Working quantitiesThe original gives none, so as a starting point: for about 8 oz of dry crusts, allow roughly a pint of milk (16-20 fl oz, depending on how thirsty the bread is) sweetened with 3-4 tablespoons of sugar, 3 eggs, and 3-4 oz of mixed currants and raisins. That will roughly fill a 1.5-quart dish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 325-350F; at that heat an hour and a half is right for a deep dish, and the custard sets without curdling at the edges.
- Soaking is the hingeThe bread must be fully saturated and then beaten smooth before the eggs go in. Dry crusts left in lumps stay chewy and leathery in the finished pudding, and eggs added to hot or unevenly soaked bread will scramble in streaks.
- SuetShredded beef suet was a common pudding fat in this period and gives a firmer, more savoury crumb than butter. Packet shredded suet, fresh suet from a butcher, or vegetarian suet all work; 3 tablespoons of melted butter is the usual substitute, with a slightly softer result.
- Mouldy breadThe instruction to reject mouldy bread still stands, and more firmly than the author knew. Mould in bread grows well below the visible surface, and baking does not destroy the toxins some species produce. Stale and hard is fine; spotted is not.
- Nutmeg and rumGrate the nutmeg fresh -- about a quarter of a whole nut. The tablespoon of rum is genuinely worth adding; it lifts the milk and suet, and most of the alcohol bakes off (a spoonful spread through a whole pudding is negligible either way).
- ServingEat warm, within an hour or so of baking, with cream or a thin custard. Leftovers keep two days refrigerated and reheat well covered at 300F.
Bread puddings of this kind sit at the practical end of Victorian cookery: bread was a major item in poorer working-class household budgets, it went stale within days, and a book like Cassell's was expected to show how nothing left the kitchen as waste. The suet places this closer to the old boiled and baked pudding tradition than to the enriched brioche-and-cream bread puddings of restaurant menus, and the currants, raisins, nutmeg and spoonful of rum are the same flavourings that ran through English plum puddings and mincemeat of the period.