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Royal Children's Puddings
Slice a penny loaf, and pour upon it a pint and a half of boiling milk. Let it stand till soft, then beat it lightly with a fork, and add a heaped table-spoonful of moist sugar, a little grated nutmeg or any other flavouring, and four well-beaten eggs. Half fill some small buttered tea-cups with the mixture, and bake the puddings in a well-heated oven. If liked, a slice of butter may be added but its absence will render the puddings more digestible. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain baked bread custard, the sort of nursery pudding Victorian households made from yesterday's loaf. The whole thing hinges on not overbaking it: the eggs set around 170-175F, and past that the custard weeps.
- A penny loafA small white loaf sold at a fixed price, its weight varying rather than fixed; sources differ on the size. About 8 oz (225 g) of plain white bread, crusts and all, stale rather than fresh, is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Moist sugarUnrefined or partly refined sugar still damp from the pan, closest today to light brown or light muscovado. One heaped tablespoon is roughly 20-25 g, which makes a barely sweet pudding by modern taste.
- A pint and a halfThis is an imperial pint of 20 fl oz, so 30 fl oz, or about 850 ml. Using US pints will leave the mixture noticeably stiff.
- "A well-heated oven"The book gives no temperature. For a custard baked in small cups, set the oven at 350F (175C) and stand the cups in a roasting tin of hot water; the twenty minutes given assumes the fiercer, less even heat of a coal range.
- Half filling the cupsThe mixture rises as the egg sets and will dome over the rim if the cups are filled higher. Ordinary ovenproof ramekins are the modern equivalent of the tea-cups; modern fine porcelain teacups may crack in a hot oven.
- Let the bread soak properlyUntil the crumb collapses under a fork. Beating in the eggs before the bread has softened leaves lumps of dry crust suspended in the custard.
- Testing for donenessThe centre should be just set with a faint wobble; a knife slid in comes out clean of liquid. Carryover heat finishes them in the cups.
- YieldFive or six persons, as stated. Note that a pint and a half of milk plus the bread makes far more mixture than a handful of 150 ml ramekins half-filled will hold, so expect a good many small cups. The "probable cost, 1s" is the household-budget note Cassell's attached to its entries, not part of the method.
The penny loaf as a unit of measure is a survival from the era of the Assize of Bread, when the price of a loaf was fixed by law and its weight varied with the price of grain; by the time Cassell's was compiled the assize had lapsed, though bakers still sold a small white loaf by the penny. Puddings of this kind - bread, milk, eggs, a scrape of sugar and nutmeg - were a staple of the Victorian nursery, cheap, filling and made from bread too stale to eat. The remark that omitting the butter renders them "more digestible" reflects the period's persistent anxiety about rich food and children's stomachs, an idea repeated across nineteenth-century domestic manuals with more confidence than evidence. Why the pudding is called "royal" is not explained in the book; such titles were often no more than a flourish.