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Bread Pudding
Take fine bread-crumbs, and pour upon them as much boiling milk as they will absorb. Soak awhile, then for every table-spoonful of bread allow one egg, well beaten; sweeten the mixture agreeably and grate in a little nutmeg. Put it into a buttered basin, and boil from twenty to thirty minutes, according to the size of the pudding. If baked, rather less time will do; it only requires to be a light brown.
A skeleton recipe of the kind Cassell's used to teach the principle rather than a fixed formula. The proportions need interpreting before you start.
- The egg ratio is the ambiguous part"One egg for every tablespoonful of bread" is far richer than any modern bread pudding — that would be several eggs to a cup of crumbs, closer to a baked custard bound with bread. It is likely the author meant a tablespoon as a rough dry measure of loose crumbs, but the text does not say. A workable reading of the same idea is one egg to each cup of soaked crumbs, or roughly one egg per half-pint of milk used.
- Basin means pudding basinA deep straight-sided bowl, buttered, filled no more than two-thirds. Cover the top with buttered paper and a pleated cloth or foil tied down, or the boiling water will get in.
- "Boil" means steam"Boil" means the basin set in water -- the basin stands in a pan of water, lid on, topped up from the kettle. Period directions to boil a basin pudding usually did mean water at a real boil, but a bare simmer with the water halfway up the sides gives a better result; a hard boil against the basin tends to a rubbery outside and an underdone middle.
- Baked temperatureBaked -- a moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F, in a roasting tin with an inch of hot water. The recipe says baking takes rather less time than the twenty to thirty minutes of boiling and asks only for a light brown; judge by the colour and by a centre that still trembles slightly rather than by the clock.
- Choose the breadStale, open-crumbed white bread, crusts removed, grated rather than blitzed to dust, since the recipe asks for fine crumbs. Modern soft sandwich loaf tends to turn to paste.
- Sweeten "agreeably"About 2 tablespoons of sugar per cup of milk is a workable reading; the recipe leaves the amount to the cook.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the surface after the mixture is in the basin as well as into it; pre-ground nutmeg loses much of the volatile oil that carries the flavour.
- YieldA pint of milk with crumbs and eggs serves about four, with cream, custard or warmed jam; allow a basin of at least 2 pints so it is not filled more than two-thirds.
Bread pudding belongs to the long English tradition of using up the stale end of the loaf, when bread was baked in quantity and nothing of it was thrown away — recipes for bread puddings, boiled and baked, appear in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward. This version is given as a ratio to be learned, not a dish to be copied, in the manner of the late-Victorian cookery-school method that Cassell's was written to serve. The instruction to boil it in a basin marks it as older in habit than in date, with the baked timing added almost as an afterthought.