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Parson's Pudding
Line a pie-dish with puff-paste, place in it a layer of any jam or jelly, cover this with bread and butter, without crust, and pour over it a quart of milk, in which four eggs and a quarter of a pound of ground rice have been mixed and well sweetened. Bake in a quick oven. Time, over an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A bread-and-butter pudding built on a rice-thickened custard, with jam and a pastry lining. The instructions are terse in the usual Cassell's manner, and one of them will ruin the dish if followed literally.
- Ignore the "quick oven"A quick oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F, which will curdle an egg-and-milk custard and split it into whey. Start hot only long enough to set the pastry, then bake at 325-350F until the centre is just barely set with a slight wobble.
- Ground riceRice milled to a coarse meal, coarser than cornflour and coarser than modern packet rice flour. Whisk it into the cold milk before adding the eggs, or it will settle into a paste at the bottom of the dish.
- The quartAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups, not the 32 oz of a US quart. Four eggs to 5 cups of milk is a lean custard; the rice flour is doing most of the setting.
- Blind-bake the liningPuff paste under a wet filling goes grey and sodden. Line the dish, chill it, bake it blind at 425F until dry and coloured, then fill.
- Order of the layersJam first, bread and butter over it, custard poured last. Butter the bread generously and lay it butter side up so the top slices crisp and brown while the custard below stays soft.
- Sweetening"Well sweetened" with jam already in the dish means roughly 2 to 3 oz of sugar in the custard, no more. Sweeten the milk, not the finished pudding.
- TimingOver an hour is right for this volume at a moderate heat, but judge by the custard, not the clock: a knife slipped in an inch from the edge should come out clean while the middle still trembles.
- Cost and yield1s 8d was a modest family outlay, the point of the dish being that bread and a spoonful of jam feed six or seven people.
Cassell's collects a great many puddings of this type, in which stale bread, milk and a few eggs are stretched into a dish for a whole table, and the pastry lining and jam layer mark this one as a step above plain bread-and-butter pudding. The name is often said to belong to a family of jokes about clerical appetites, of the kind also generally invoked to explain parson's nose for the tail of a fowl; the attribution is traditional rather than traceable to any particular parson. Ground rice appears constantly in Victorian sweet cookery as a cheap thickener that gave body without the richness of extra eggs, and its use here, alongside jam rather than fresh fruit, is characteristic of a household economising while still putting something ornamental on the table.