Home › The Principles of Cookery › Bread Pudding, Boiled
Bread Pudding, Boiled
Soak half a pint of bread-crumbs with one pint of milk thrown on them while in a boiling state, and when the milk has become cold, add three well-beaten eggs, two ounces of currants, with sugar and nutmeg to taste. Mix all well together, butter a basin, pour in the mixture, and keep it boiling, with a cloth securely tied over the top, for rather more than one hour. Pieces of bread unfit for the table, on account of their staleness, may be used up in bread puddings, by carefully soaking them, and then pressing them dry before they are added to the rest. Probable cost, 7d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain boiled custard pudding of the thrifty Victorian sort, steamed in a basin rather than baked. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements are by old British volume and the cooking method assumes a pudding cloth.
- Half a pint of crumbsAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so roughly 1¼ US cups of fresh crumbs, about 2 to 2½ oz by weight. The pint of milk is likewise 20 fl oz, nearly 2½ US cups.
- Scalding, not soaking coldThe milk goes on boiling hot and is then left to cool completely. That swells the crumbs and dissolves them into the milk; adding the eggs to hot milk would scramble them.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Two ounces is a scant half cup.
- The basin and the coverUse a heatproof pudding basin of about two pints, buttered well, filled no more than three-quarters; the mixture comes to roughly 1½ pints. Modern practice is a pleated round of parchment and foil tied under the rim with string, which does the same job as the cloth the recipe calls for and is easier to lift out.
- Boiling means a steady simmerStand the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, with water reaching halfway up the sides, and keep it at a gentle simmer with the lid on. A hard rolling boil will curdle an egg custard and leave it watery. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the pan never runs dry.
- Timing and donenessRather more than an hour is right for this size, but judge by the pudding: it should feel set and springy, and a skewer in the centre should come out clean. A larger basin needs longer.
- Using up stale breadThe instruction to soak stale pieces and press them dry matters — waterlogged bread thins the custard. Squeeze the soaked bread firmly before it joins the mixture, and reduce the milk slightly if it still seems wet.
- Yield and servingFour to five as written. Turn it out onto a warm plate and serve with a sweet sauce, custard, or simply cream. The "probable cost, 7d" is a period price, of no use except as a reminder that this was cheap food.
Boiled puddings held in a cloth or a basin were the backbone of British domestic cookery long before most households had a reliable oven, and bread puddings in particular belonged to the economy of the kitchen rather than the pleasures of the table: they existed to consume the ends of loaves that had gone too dry to slice. The listed cost of sevenpence, and the confident note that the pudding will feed four or five, are typical of the late nineteenth-century compendium, which addressed a mistress of the house budgeting for a household and expected her to weigh a dish's expense against its yield. Currants and grated nutmeg are the standard sweet-spice pairing of the era, the currants reaching Britain from Greece.