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Poor Knight's Pudding
Cut two penny rolls into slices three-quarters of an inch thick. Lay them on a dish, pour over them half a pint of milk, and let them lie until the bread has soaked up all the milk. Make a little custard with three-quarters of a pint of milk, three eggs, a little sugar, and grated nutmeg. Pour half of this over the slices of roll. Fry in butter until they are brown. Put them on a hot dish, and pour the rest of the custard over them. Send butter and sugar to table with them. Time to fry, about ten minutes. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A British fried-bread pudding of the pain perdu family, written for cooks with stale rolls to use up. Two things need translating: the imperial pints, and the fact that half the custard is never cooked.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz. Half a pint of milk for soaking is 10 fl oz (about 1¼ US cups); three-quarters of a pint for the custard is 15 fl oz (just under 2 US cups).
- Penny rollsSmall plain white yeast rolls sold by the each, denser and drier than a modern dinner roll. Day-old brioche, challah or a firm white bloomer cut into ¾-inch slices behaves the same way — fresh soft bread will collapse in the milk.
- EggsVictorian eggs were often smaller than a modern large egg, so three may amount to somewhat less than three large ones today; treat any equivalence as approximate. With 15 fl oz of milk the custard is deliberately thin; it is a soaking liquid and a sauce, not a set custard.
- The uncooked halfHalf the custard goes over the bread before frying, and the rest is poured over at table without ever seeing heat. That reserved portion is raw egg in milk. Either cook it as a proper stirred custard over low heat to 175F, or serve the slices with the butter and sugar alone.
- FryingButter alone will brown and burn before the slices colour evenly. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, over medium heat gives the ten minutes the recipe expects — roughly four to five minutes a side for a batch, not per slice.
- Draining the slicesLift the soaked bread on a slotted spatula and let it drain a moment before it hits the pan. Waterlogged slices steam rather than brown and tend to break.
- Yield and costThree or four servings, as stated. The 9d is the compiler's guide to household economy, not a price you can convert usefully.
The name is one of the oldest jokes in European cookery: a knight with no money eats bread, eggs and milk rather than meat. Versions appear across the continent under the same conceit — German arme Ritter, Danish and Norwegian arme riddere, Swedish fattiga riddare — and the English form is often linked, traditionally rather than on documentary evidence, to the Poor Knights of Windsor, the pensioner-knights housed at Windsor Castle from the fourteenth century. The dish itself is simply French toast under an older name, close kin to pain perdu, "lost bread", the point in every case being to rescue rolls that have gone hard. Its presence in Cassell's, priced at ninepence, marks it as a lesson in thrift as much as a pudding: a Victorian kitchen produced stale bread daily, and a book of this kind expected a cook to have a use for all of it.