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Strawberry and Custard Pudding
Take four ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Place four table-spoonfuls of strawberry jam in a buttered pie-dish, cover this with the bread-crumbs, and make some good nicely-flavoured custard with a pint of milk, two eggs, and a little sugar. Stir the custard over the fire till it begins to thicken, pour it gradually upon the bread-crumbs, and bake the pudding in a moderately-heated oven. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A thrifty Victorian bread-and-custard pudding, layered rather than mixed. The only real technical risk is the custard, which is cooked twice.
- Oven temperature"Moderately-heated" is generally taken as somewhere around 350F (175C). Half an hour suits a shallow dish; a deeper one is likely to need rather longer.
- The pint is imperial20 fl oz, so a little under 2 1/2 US cups of milk. With only two eggs to that much milk the set is deliberately soft, closer to a spoonable custard than a sliceable one. A third egg gives a firmer pudding if you prefer it.
- BreadcrumbsFour ounces of finely grated crumbs is roughly two cups of fresh crumbs from a day-old white loaf, grated on a box grater rather than blitzed to dust. Dried packaged crumbs absorb differently and will make the layer dense.
- The hinge: stop stirring earlyTake the custard off the heat the moment it thickens enough to coat the spoon, around 170-175F. It finishes setting in the oven, so any curdling on the stove cannot be corrected later. If it looks grainy, strain it before pouring.
- Pour gradually, and waitAdding the hot custard slowly lets the crumbs swell without floating up through it. Give the dish ten minutes to stand before baking so the crumbs are evenly soaked.
- Pie-dishAn oval or round ceramic dish of roughly 2 pints capacity, not a pie plate with a crust. Butter it well; the jam at the bottom will catch and caramelise at the edges.
- Water bath, optionalThe original bakes the dish direct. Setting it in a roasting tin of hot water gives a smoother, less bubbled custard, at the cost of a slightly longer bake.
- Doneness and servingDone when the centre still wobbles as a single mass and a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. Serves four to five, warm rather than hot, with cream.
Puddings of this kind sit at the frugal end of the Victorian sweet course: stale bread, a spoonful of preserve and a thin custard, assembled in the dish the pudding is served from. Cassell's habit of quoting a "probable cost" — a shilling here — suited a reader budgeting by the week. The layered arrangement of jam and breadcrumb custard is of a piece with dishes such as queen of puddings, and household strawberry jam put up in the summer would keep a fruit pudding like this available out of season.