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Bun Pudding
Take as many stale buns as a dish will contain without crowding; mix a custard, allowing five eggs to a quart of milk; season it with sugar and any kind of spices. Pour the custard over the buns, and let them stand and soak one or two hours. When all the custard is absorbed, bake for an hour and a half. This makes a very economical and pleasant pudding for a family where there are many children.
A baked custard in all but name, with stale buns standing in for bread. The only real decisions the original leaves to you are the oven and the dish.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyNo temperature is given, but a custard set for an hour and a half must be in a slow to moderate oven, 300-325F. Any hotter and the egg curdles at the edges while the centre is still liquid; a roasting tin of hot water around the dish makes this reliable.
- ProportionsFive eggs to a quart of milk is a lean custard by modern standards — about 1 egg per 225ml. It sets soft and sliceable rather than rich. If you want something closer to a bread-and-butter pudding, add two more eggs or two yolks.
- Quart and other unitsAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.1 litres, not the American 32 fl oz. Sugar is unspecified: 3-4 oz (75-100g) per quart suits buns that are already sweetened.
- "Any kind of spices"Nutmeg grated over the top is the usual choice, or cinnamon, mace, or lemon peel infused in the warmed milk. Ground spice stirred in cold will sink and speckle the base.
- The bunsCurrant buns, Chelsea buns, or plain teacakes — anything enriched and slightly dry. Split them, or the centres stay dense. Genuinely stale is the point: fresh buns turn to paste in the custard.
- SoakingOne to two hours is generous but harmless. Keep it in the refrigerator rather than on the counter, and bring the dish out for twenty minutes before it goes into the oven.
- DonenessIgnore the clock towards the end. The pudding is done when the centre is just set with a slight wobble and a knife inserted an inch from the middle comes out clean; carry-over heat finishes it.
- YieldA quart of custard and roughly six to eight split buns will fill a dish of about 2 litres and serve six to eight. Good warm, and better cold the next day.
Bun pudding belongs to the large family of English puddings built on stale baked goods — bread and butter pudding, cabinet pudding, Queen of Puddings — all of which exist because bread went hard in a day or two and throwing it out was unthinkable. The closing line about "a family where there are many children" is the whole argument for it, and is typical of Victorian domestic manuals, which were written for households running on a fixed allowance and judged a dish first on cost per head.