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Wholesome-Fare Pudding
This favourite bread-and-butter pudding may be thus made. Cut some thin slices of bread and butter; butter a dish, and lay slices all over it. Strew on a few currants picked and washed clean, a little grated nutmeg and cinnamon pounded or in small pieces; then a row of bread and butter, then a few currants again, with the spice as before, and so on, till the dish is full. Sweeten some milk according to the size of the dish, and beat up three eggs, a little salt, and a little more nutmeg grated. Mix them all together, pour the custard over the bread, and bake. Three rows of bread and butter are sufficient for a dish of a moderate size, as it swells considerably. Slices of bread and beef-suet chopped fine will answer the purpose of bread and butter for a family pudding. Let it stand an hour after the milk has been put to it before it is put into the oven. More eggs may be added, and cream used instead of milk, if it is intended to be very rich.
A plain baked bread-and-butter custard, written for cooks who judged quantities by the dish rather than by measure. Two things need pinning down: how much milk, and how hot the oven.
- The milk is left to you"Sweeten some milk according to the size of the dish" is genuinely open. For a 1.5-quart dish with three layers of bread, about 1 pint (2 cups) of milk to the three eggs gives a custard that sets; 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar is the usual sweetening. More eggs, as the text says, make it firmer and richer.
- The hour's soak is the hingeThe hour's soak is in the text -- Standing an hour after the milk goes on is explicitly instructed. Bread that goes straight into the oven takes up custard less evenly, and can leave a wet layer underneath.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only 'bake', with no oven description given. Egg custard sets at around 175-180F internally, so a low-moderate oven, about 325F for 45 minutes to an hour, until the centre is just set with a slight wobble. A roasting tin of hot water around the dish is insurance against curdling.
- BreadPeriod recipes mean a close-crumbed white household loaf, a day or two old. Modern sliced sandwich bread collapses to paste; brioche or challah goes the other way and turns the dish into something much sweeter. A firm white or a plain bloomer, cut thin and buttered generously, is closest.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Picked and washed" refers to removing stems and grit from barrel-sold fruit; packaged currants need only a rinse, and a short soak in warm water keeps them from scorching on the top layer.
- The suet variantThe text offers chopped beef suet in place of bread and butter 'for a family pudding', i.e. the plainer everyday version. It works, but tastes distinctly savoury-rich to modern palates; shredded packet suet is the nearest equivalent if you want to try it.
- SpicingWhole nutmeg grated fresh and cinnamon broken small, as written, rather than pre-ground. "A little" here is restrained by later standards, perhaps a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg total across the layers.
- YieldA moderate dish of three layers serves four to six. Serve warm rather than hot; the custard firms as it cools.
Bread-and-butter pudding is the household answer to stale bread, and layered versions with dried fruit and spice appear in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, with related buttered-bread and whitepot puddings earlier still. The title here is doing a particular job: Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was aimed largely at middle-class households keeping an eye on cost, and "wholesome fare" signals nourishment and thrift rather than luxury, which is why the recipe offers chopped beef suet as a stand-in for butter and cream as an upgrade only "if it is intended to be very rich." Currants and nutmeg were standard spicing for baked puddings of the period, and the instruction to grate the nutmeg fresh sits in a period when adulteration of ground goods was a routine complaint.