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Cottage Bread Pudding
Take any crusts of bread that may have been left, and be sure that they are perfectly clean. Put them into a saucepan with a pint and a half of milk to one pound of bread. Simmer very gently, and when the bread is quite soft, take it from the fire and beat it well with a fork. Add two table-spoonfuls of sugar, half a nutmeg grated, a couple of ounces of finely-shredded suet, or a piece of sweet dripping the size of a large egg, three eggs well beaten, and a handful of picked currants. Put the mixture into a well-buttered pie-dish, and bake three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost, 6d.
A frugal pudding built to use up bread that has gone hard, with no oven setting given because the original cook judged by hand. Bake at 350F for the stated three-quarters of an hour.
- The ratio is the recipeA pound of dry crusts to a pint and a half of milk — about 450 g bread to roughly 850 ml — gives a soft but not soupy mass. Stale bread absorbs far more than fresh, so if you are using softer bread, hold back some of the milk and add it only if the mixture looks dry after mashing.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven setting of any kind. A modern equivalent for a pudding of this sort is around 350F (175C), at which forty-five minutes should set the custard and brown the top.
- Suet and drippingShredded beef suet is still sold in some butchers and as packaged shredded suet in the UK; "sweet dripping" means fresh, unsalted beef or pork fat with no savoury drippings clinging to it. Two ounces is about 55 g, and the "piece the size of a large egg" is roughly the same. Unsalted butter is the usual modern swap and gives a milder pudding.
- Half a nutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated comes to roughly a teaspoon and a half — assertive by current taste. A quarter of a nutmeg, or a rounded half-teaspoon of freshly grated, is nearer what many people now want.
- "Picked currants"Dried currants once arrived with stalks and grit in them, so they had to be picked over and rinsed. Packaged currants need no picking, but a short soak in warm water keeps them from drawing moisture out of the custard. A handful is roughly 50-75 g.
- Beating with a forkA fork leaves the bread in ragged pieces rather than a smooth paste; a blender or food processor turns it to wallpaper paste.
- Add the eggs off the heatThe bread and milk must cool below scalding before the three beaten eggs go in, or they will scramble in streaks. Let the pan stand for five minutes after mashing.
- Dish and yieldA buttered pie dish of about 1.5 to 2 litres suits the quantity. It serves six as written, and is best warm; cold it firms up enough to slice.
Bread puddings of this kind are the plainest form of a very old English economy: bread loomed large in most household budgets, and nothing that could still be softened in milk was thrown away. Cassell's attaches a probable cost of sixpence to it, and the recipe feeds six. The name "cottage" is often said to do the same work here as in cottage pie: marking the dish as the modest, meatless-or-scrap version of something grander. The choice offered between suet and dripping is telling: dripping was what a cook had if the household roasted meat, and its appearance in a sweet pudding was unremarkable until vegetable shortenings and cheaper butter displaced it in the twentieth century.