Home › The Principles of Cookery › Lemon Bread Pudding, Baked
Lemon Bread Pudding, Baked
Grate three ounces of the stale crumb of bread very finely, mix with it three table-spoonfuls of sugar and the grated rind of three lemons; add a quarter of a pint of cream and the same of milk. Mix the ingredients very thoroughly, then add the strained juice of the lemons, and six well-beaten eggs, omitting the whites of two. Butter a pie-dish, pour in the mixture, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, about an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A baked lemon custard held together with breadcrumbs rather than pastry or flour. It is a plain formula that depends entirely on gentle heat and good lemons.
- The hinge: gentle heatThis is a custard, not a sponge. Bake it at 350F (a moderate oven) and, if your oven runs hot or uneven, stand the pie-dish in a roasting tin of hot water. Custard driven too hard curdles and weeps whey around the edge.
- Old measuresA quarter of a pint in an English book of this date is 5 fl oz, or about two-thirds of a US cup. So roughly 10 fl oz of liquid in total, split evenly between cream and whole milk. Three ounces of crumb is about 1½ cups of finely grated dry crumbs, loosely packed.
- Stale crumb, not crust"Stale crumb of bread" means the interior of a day-or-two-old white loaf with the crust cut away, grated on a box grater. Packaged dried breadcrumbs are far denser and will make the pudding heavy; if you use a food processor, sift out the coarse pieces.
- The eggsSix eggs less two whites means four whole eggs plus two yolks. The withheld whites keep the pudding from puffing and then collapsing into something rubbery.
- Three lemons' worth of rindThat is a very forward flavour by modern standards, and it depends on unwaxed fruit, since wax and fungicide sit precisely where the zest is. Scrub and dry the lemons first, and take only the yellow, not the white pith beneath.
- Add the juice last, and expect curdlingThe recipe strains the juice in after the dairy. The acid will thicken and slightly clot the milk on contact; whisk it through quickly and get the dish into the oven rather than letting it stand.
- SugarThree tablespoons against three lemons' juice and rind is sharp to most palates now. Five or six tablespoons brings it into the range of a modern lemon pudding without changing the structure.
- Doneness and timingAn hour is about right for a shallow pie-dish at 350F. It is done when the centre wobbles as a set mass rather than rippling like liquid; a probe reads about 175F. Serve warm or cold, four to five portions as the original states.
- The cost line"Probable cost, 1s. 8d." is the kind of costing these books attached to a middling family pudding; the cream, the three lemons and the six eggs all count against it, while the stale bread costs nothing.
Bread puddings sit at the frugal end of the English sweet-course repertoire, built to use the stale end of a loaf that no household would have thrown away; what raises this one is the cream, the lemons and the six eggs, which push it toward the baked lemon custards served at better tables. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, issued in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, was arranged alphabetically as a reference work rather than a narrative cookbook, which is why so many near-identical bread puddings appear in sequence, each varied by one flavouring. The costing in shillings and pence at the foot of each entry was a standard feature of the period's household manuals, apparently aimed at the mistress planning a week's expenditure rather than the cook at the range. The omission of two whites is a small piece of practical craft: it keeps the pudding dense and creamy rather than souffle-like.