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Chocolate Bread Pudding
2 cups stale bread crumbs, 1 quart scalded milk, Yolks 3 eggs, 1/4 cup sugar, Whites 3 eggs, 2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/4 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful hot water, 1/4 teaspoonful salt. Pour milk over bread crumbs, cover, and let stand twenty minutes. Add yolks of eggs, well beaten, mixed with sugar, melted chocolate, soda dissolved in water and salt; then fold in whites of eggs, beaten until stiff. Turn into a buttered pudding dish, and bake in a moderate oven fifty minutes. Serve with
A thrift pudding dressed up with unsweetened chocolate. Two things need translating: the size of a chocolate "square" and the deliberately low sugar, which assumes a sweet sauce poured over at the table.
- The chocolate squaresWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened chocolate, moulded in one-ounce squares. Use 2 oz (about 55 g) unsweetened baking chocolate, melted; the recipe is not built for semisweet, which would throw the sugar out entirely.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). Fifty minutes at that temperature is about right for a 1 1/2 to 2 quart dish; the pudding is done when a knife inserted near the centre comes out clean and the top has just set.
- SweetnessA quarter cup of sugar against 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate is barely sweet by modern standards. The truncated last line pointed to a sauce -- hard sauce, cream, or a vanilla custard sauce -- and the pudding wants one.
- The sodaA quarter teaspoon of baking soda dissolved in hot water is not there for lift. It neutralises the acidity of the chocolate, darkening the colour and softening the flavour. It can be left out; the pudding will taste slightly sharper and look redder.
- Scalded milk and standing timeA quart is 4 cups. Scald it to just below a simmer, pour over the crumbs, and give the full twenty minutes -- stale bread needs that long to swell, and undersoaked crumbs stay gritty.
- Order of mixingLet the crumb mixture cool to warm before the beaten yolks go in, or they will curdle. Fold the whites in last with a light hand; they are the only thing keeping this from being dense.
- Crumbs, not cubesStale bread crumbs here means torn or grated dry bread, not fine dry crumbs from a canister. Packaged breadcrumbs absorb differently and give a pasty result.
- YieldServes six to eight. Best warm, within an hour of baking; refrigerated leftovers firm up considerably.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its chocolate mill to 1780, the year James Baker began under his own name after an earlier partnership with John Hannon dating to 1765, and by the turn of the twentieth century was among the best-known chocolate names in the United States. Choice Recipes was one of a long series of small promotional booklets the firm distributed, collecting recipes from cooking-school teachers and domestic writers, typically specifying Baker's Premium No. 1 or Baker's Breakfast Cocoa by name. The dish itself is older than the chocolate in it: bread pudding was a common American use for stale loaf ends, and adding two ounces of unsweetened chocolate turned a frugal nursery pudding into something a hostess could serve with a sauce. The pinch of soda is a period habit, meant to take the edge off chocolate that was more bitter and less finely ground than what comes off a modern conche.