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Milton Pudding
2 cups stale bread crumbs, 4 cups scalded milk, 2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/3 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon.
Soak bread in milk one-half hour. Melt chocolate in saucepan placed over hot water; add sugar, mixed with cinnamon and salt, and enough milk--taken from bread and milk--to make of consistency to pour. Add to bread mixture; then add eggs, beaten slightly. Turn into a slightly-buttered pudding-dish, and bake in a moderate oven forty-five minutes. Serve with egg or vanilla cream sauce.
A baked chocolate bread pudding from a chocolate company's promotional booklet, which is why it leans on unsweetened chocolate rather than cocoa. It is only lightly sweetened by design; the sauce is meant to finish it.
- The chocolate squaresWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 came scored into one-ounce squares of plain unsweetened chocolate, so this is 2 oz. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is a direct substitute; do not use semisweet, which will throw off both the sugar and the texture.
- Moderate ovenRead as about 350F; the term covered roughly 350-375F. Forty-five minutes suits a dish of around 1 1/2 quarts, which is about what this quantity fills; a shallower dish will set faster.
- SweetnessA third of a cup of sugar against 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate makes a distinctly bitter pudding by current tastes. The egg or vanilla cream sauce is not optional garnish, it is the balance of the dish.
- Bread crumbs"Stale bread crumbs" here means soft crumb torn or grated from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs. Dried crumbs will absorb the milk unevenly and give a pasty set.
- Scalded milkHeat to just below a simmer, when it steams and edges bubble. Scalding was partly a keeping measure in the days before pasteurisation, but it still speeds the soak and gives a smoother custard.
- Tempering the chocolateThe instruction to thin the melted chocolate with milk drawn from the soaking bread matters. Cold liquid or a stiff chocolate paste stirred straight into the bread will seize into gritty specks that never disperse.
- The eggsTwo eggs in four cups of milk is a loose set. Beat them slightly, as directed, and add last, off any heat; a vigorous beating puts air in and gives the top a soufflé crust that collapses.
- DonenessLook for a knife inserted an inch from the centre coming out clean while the middle still trembles, around 175-180F. Baked to a firm centre throughout it will weep.
- YieldSix servings. Good warm; the texture tightens usefully after a night in the refrigerator.
Choice Recipes was one of a long series of recipe booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the oldest chocolate firm in the United States, and its purpose was frankly commercial: the recipes call for the company's own Premium No. 1 chocolate or breakfast cocoa. Recipes in these booklets were credited to Maria Parloa and other Boston Cooking School figures, which may account for the clipped, weighed-and-measured style. The name most likely nods to Milton, the town immediately across the Neponset River from the Baker mills at Dorchester Lower Mills, though the booklets rarely explain their titles. The dish itself is a thrifty New England bread pudding, made company-worthy by two ounces of chocolate and a poured sauce — exactly the argument a chocolate manufacturer wanted to make.