Home › The Principles of Cookery › French Roll Pudding
French Roll Pudding
Butter a deep dish, and line it with thin slices of buttered French roll, free from crust, and a day or two old, letting the slices overlap. Boil half a pint of milk, and flavour with vanilla when cool. Mix with it the yolks of two eggs and the white of one; add one ounce of sugar. Moisten the roll gradually with this. Beat the white of the second egg to a stiff froth and incorporate it with the rest of the custard; pour this into the dish, and lay a few more slices of buttered roll on top. Put the dish in a tin of hot water, and bake in a steady oven until the bread is nicely browned. Probable cost, 8d.
A small bread-and-butter pudding built on stale French roll rather than sliced loaf, baked in a water bath. The custard is very lean by modern standards, so the oven temperature and the bain-marie are what keep it from curdling.
- The hinge: keep the oven lowThe hinge: keep the oven moderate and unwavering -- "a steady oven" implies steady, middling heat, though the book gives no figures; something in the region of 325F is a reasonable modern reading. Set the dish in its tin of hot water. Higher heat will set the outside into curds before the centre thickens.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pint of milk is 10 fl oz in the British measure this book uses, so a scant 1 1/4 US cups. One ounce of sugar is about 2 tablespoons.
- Flavour the milk while it is hot, not coolThe instruction to flavour "when cool" suits vanilla extract, which loses aroma in boiling milk. If you are using a split vanilla pod, add it to the milk as it heats and steep off the heat for 15 minutes instead.
- Temper the eggsThe milk must be genuinely cool, not warm, before the yolks go in, or whisk a little of the warm milk into the eggs first. The recipe gives no safeguard beyond "when cool."
- French rollA soft white dinner roll rather than a baguette. Day-old is essential; fresh crumb turns to paste instead of absorbing the custard. Trim the crust as directed and butter the slices generously on one side.
- The lone beaten whiteFolding one stiff white into the custard lightens it a little. Fold it in at the last moment and pour straight away, before it deflates.
- Soaking time"Moisten the roll gradually" wants patience; the recipe sets no time, but let the lined dish stand long enough for the bread to drink before the final layer goes on top.
- Doneness and yieldBake in a small dish until the bread is nicely browned and the centre wobbles as a set custard rather than sloshing; on half a pint of milk and two eggs expect two modest servings.
Bread-and-butter pudding is the classic English answer to stale bread; seventeenth-century English printed sources give bread-and-milk puddings such as whitepot, while recipes under the name bread-and-butter pudding are an eighteenth-century arrival, well before Cassell's collected this one. What marks this variant is the roll: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English bakers sold small enriched white rolls under the name "French rolls," prized for a fine, close crumb, and they were often reached for where a delicate texture was wanted. The water bath and the single beaten white belong to the same impulse, an attempt to give a thrift pudding the manners of a baked custard. The costing of 8d. is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every dish so that a household could weigh the day's dinner against the day's budget; at late-Victorian prices this was a cheap sweet made almost entirely from what was already in the kitchen.