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Poor Epicure's Pudding
Put two pints of new milk into a saucepan with four inches of stick cinnamon, half a dozen blanched and sliced almonds, the thin rind of a lemon, or any flavouring that may be preferred. Bring it slowly to the boil; strain, and add to the milk a pinch of salt and a little sugar. If Swiss milk is used sugar will not be required. When the milk is cold, mix with it three wellbeaten eggs. Pour the custard into a buttered pie-dish, and lay on the top slices of bread the third of an inch thick. These should be thickly buttered on both sides, should be entirely free from crust, and should cover the milk entirely. Bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, forty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
An inverted bread-and-butter pudding: the custard goes in first, the buttered bread floats on top and browns into a lid. Two details carry it.
- Cool the milk before the eggsThis is the hinge. Adding beaten eggs to hot infused milk scrambles them. Let the strained milk come down to lukewarm at most, or chill it as directed.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 325-350F/165-175C. The recipe gives no water bath, but setting the pie-dish in a roasting tin of hot water is a safeguard: baked dry at that heat for forty minutes the custard may curdle at the edges before the centre sets.
- Doneness, not clockForty minutes suits a shallow dish. Judge by a slight wobble at the centre when nudged; a knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean.
- Swiss milkSweetened condensed milk. "Swiss milk" was the common British term for the tinned product, after the Swiss condensed-milk firms whose goods were widely sold here in the later nineteenth century. If you use it, dilute roughly one part condensed to two parts water to make up the two pints, and omit the sugar as the recipe says.
- New milkMilk fresh from the cow, unskimmed. Whole milk is the equivalent; a splash of cream in place of some of the milk gives a closer approximation of Victorian dairy.
- AlmondsSix sliced almonds are for perfume only, not texture. Blanched means skinned in hot water. Strain them out with the cinnamon and lemon rind.
- The bread lidA third of an inch is a scant 1 cm. Crustless, buttered on both faces, and butted edge to edge so no custard shows, or the exposed patches set into rubbery blisters.
- Yield and costFive or six servings. One shilling for the whole dish is the point of the title: eggs, milk and bread standing in for an epicure's richer pudding.
Bread-and-butter pudding was a fixture of English domestic cookery well before Cassell's, a way of using bread that had gone dry in an era when a household baked or bought daily and threw nothing away. The joke in the name is one Victorian cookery books made often, in dishes styled "mock" or "poor man's" something: a genuine epicure's pudding might be enriched with cream, spirits or dried fruit, while this version reaches for flavour by infusion instead, stick cinnamon, lemon peel and a few almonds lending the milk an air of expense it did not cost. The buttered bread is laid on top rather than layered through, so the crust browns while the custard beneath stays soft.