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Bread Pudding (Three cups of bread crumbs one)
Three cups of bread crumbs, one tablespoon of sugar, two eggs, two cups of milk, two squares of chocolate dissolved in the milk, one-half cup of raisins, one-half cup of currants, one teaspoon of vanilla, one teaspoon of cinnamon, one-half teaspoon of nutmeg, a piece of butter size of walnut, and a half teaspoon of salt. Bake in moderate oven and serve with hard sauce.
— Mrs. Elmer P. Miller
A plain chocolate bread pudding of the church-supper sort, written for cooks who already knew what a bread pudding looked like. Two details need attention before you start: the chocolate and the sugar.
- The sugar is almost certainly too littleTwo squares of baking chocolate ordinarily meant two ounces of unsweetened chocolate, and one tablespoon of sugar will not touch it. Either the receipt assumed a sweetened "chocolate" or the hard sauce was expected to carry the whole load. Between a third and a half cup of sugar in the custard, or sweetened chocolate in place of unsweetened, will bring it into balance.
- Two squaresBaking chocolate was sold in scored one-ounce squares, so this is 2 oz. "Dissolved in the milk" means melted into warmed milk, not stirred into cold.
- Bread crumbsNot the dry fine crumbs sold in canisters. This wants stale bread torn or cut into rough pieces, or coarse soft crumbs, so it can swell in the custard. Three cups of packed dry crumbs would drink the milk and bake into a brick.
- CurrantsZante currants, the small dried grape, not fresh red or black currants. They and the raisins benefit from a short soak in hot water if they have gone hard.
- Moderate oven350F. A pudding this size, in a 1 1/2-quart dish, takes roughly 45 to 55 minutes; it is done when a knife slid into the centre comes out clean and the middle no longer sloshes.
- A water bath is worth itThe receipt does not call for one, but two eggs to two cups of milk is a loose custard and direct oven heat curdles the edges. Setting the dish in a pan of hot water gives a smoother set.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and flavoured with vanilla, brandy or rum, chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding so it melts. It is not cooked.
- YieldFour to six servings, depending on the generosity of the sauce.
Bread pudding is a thrift dish of long standing in the English-speaking kitchen: stale bread, milk, eggs and whatever dried fruit and spice the house had. What dates this particular version is the chocolate. Baking chocolate in scored squares became a reliable pantry staple in American households through the second half of the nineteenth century, and cooks began working it into puddings, custards and cakes that had gone unchocolated for generations. A community cookbook like this one, made up of receipts contributed under contributors' own names, is exactly where you see that shift happening at household level, one signature at a time. The hard sauce finish is equally of its period, an English inheritance that stayed in American cooking long after the boiled and steamed puddings it is usually associated with had faded.