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Bread Pudding (Three pints of milk one cup)
Three pints of milk, one cup of raisins, four eggs, one cup of sugar, one-half cup of butter, three cups of bread crumbs, half a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of nutmeg, and a tablespoon of molasses. Bake in a slow oven.
A plain custard-bound bread pudding with no pan size, time or temperature given beyond "slow oven." The proportions are sound; the technique needs filling in.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300-325F. A bread pudding set at higher heat curdles at the edges before the centre thickens.
- The hinge: a water bathThree pints of milk to four eggs is a loose custard, and it will weep or scramble if baked dry. Set the dish in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides and bake until the centre is just barely wobbly, roughly 60-80 minutes. Note that the full batch fills well over two quarts, so use a 3-quart dish or divide it between two smaller ones.
- Bread crumbsIn period usage these are torn or grated stale bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters today. Dry packaged crumbs will absorb the milk into paste; use three cups of stale white bread, torn, and let it soak in the warmed milk for 15 minutes before adding the eggs.
- Scald the milk, then temperWarming the milk with the butter and sugar and adding it slowly to the beaten eggs dissolves the sugar and shortens the bake. Pour it into the eggs in a thin stream while whisking.
- ButterHalf a cup is generous by modern habit and makes a rich, almost bready custard. It can be halved without harming the set, since the eggs do the setting.
- MolassesOne tablespoon is for colour and a faint bitterness rather than sweetness. Use unsulphured molasses; blackstrap is too aggressive at this ratio.
- RaisinsToss them through the soaked bread rather than dropping them on top, or they will scorch on the surface. Plumping them in hot water or a spoon of spirits first keeps them from drawing moisture out of the custard.
- YieldServes 8 generously. Good warm, and better cold the next day, when the custard has firmed.
Bread pudding earned its place in cookbooks of this kind because it solved a daily problem: bread went stale fast in households that baked their own, and milk soured faster still. Recipes of this kind belong to a long English tradition of bread-and-butter and "cabinet" puddings, thrift dishes elevated by eggs, sugar and spice into something fit to serve at table. The tablespoon of molasses is a small American touch; molasses remained a household staple in many kitchens long after white sugar became affordable. The absence of a time or a pan size is typical of the genre: a reader was assumed to know what a slow oven felt like and how large her own pudding dish was.