Home › The Principles of Cookery › Bretonne Brandy Pudding
Bretonne Brandy Pudding
Boil six ounces of loaf sugar in half a pint of milk, allow it to cool for a little, and add to it six well-beaten eggs; then let it get quite cold. Prepare a quarter of a pound of thin slices of stale bread and saturate the half of them with two glasses of brandy. Lay some of the bread in a basin previously buttered, holding a pint and a half. Strew over it some chopped candied orange-peel and stoned raisins, and then some custard, till all is used up. Tie the basin over with a buttered paper. Let it stand to soak for ten minutes, and steam for an hour and three-quarters. Turn out, and serve with a sauce of clarified sugar which has been seasoned with vanilla and brandy. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A steamed bread-and-custard pudding in the Victorian manner: six eggs to half a pint of milk makes this far richer and firmer than a modern bread pudding, and the long steam is what sets it well enough to unmould.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in hard cones, broken up and crushed before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is a direct substitute at the same weight, 6 oz.
- "Two glasses" of brandyGenuinely imprecise. A Victorian wine glass in cookery writing is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, giving roughly 4 fl oz in total, but the book does not say. Start with less: a quarter pound of bread will only absorb so much before it collapses.
- Basin and volumeA pint and a half is an imperial measure, about 30 fl oz or a scant 4 US cups. The pudding needs headroom, so butter a basin of that capacity and expect it filled nearly to the top.
- Buttered paperThe period seal was buttered paper tied down with string. Pleat a sheet of parchment with foil over it and tie under the rim, or the condensate will run in and waterlog the top.
- SteamingSet the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a covered pan with water reaching halfway up the sides, kept at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil. Top up with boiling water as it goes; an hour and three-quarters is a long time to leave a pan unwatched.
- DonenessThe centre should read about 175F and a skewer come out clean. A hard boil rather than a simmer will curdle a custard this egg-heavy and leave it weeping when turned out.
- Turning outLet it stand five to ten minutes off the heat before inverting, or the hot custard will slump. Run a knife round the rim first.
- Clarified sugar sauceSimply a sugar syrup boiled and skimmed clear; make a heavy syrup, about 1 cup sugar to 1/2 cup water, and flavour off the heat with vanilla and a spoonful of brandy so the spirit is not driven off.
- Cost and yieldThe 2s 6d is Victorian money and suggests this was a company pudding rather than an everyday one. It serves six or seven as written, in small portions.
Cassell's hung French place-names on dishes with only a loose claim to them; the "Bretonne" here has no documented Breton original behind it, and Brittany's own bread-and-custard tradition runs more to far breton than to a steamed basin pudding. What the recipe actually is, is a British steamed pudding of the classic type: stale bread, a rich boiled custard, candied peel and raisins, sealed under paper and cooked over water " perhaps because a coal range was often said to give a cook steadier heat in a simmering pot than in an oven. Steaming also allowed a pudding to be started early and held, and the use of stale bread and the fixed "probable cost" line are both marks of a book written for households running to a weekly budget, where brandy and candied orange-peel marked a dish out as something for guests.