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Mrs. Armstrong's Chocolate Pudding
Soften three cups of stale bread in an equal quantity of milk. Melt two squares of Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate over hot water and mix with half a cup of sugar, a little salt, three beaten eggs and a half teaspoonful of vanilla. Mix this thoroughly with the bread and place in well-buttered custard cups. Steam about half an hour (according to size) and serve in the cups or turned out on warm plate.--Mrs. Helen Armstrong.
A steamed chocolate bread pudding, baked in individual cups rather than one basin. It is a thrift recipe -- the chocolate is the only expensive thing in it -- and the texture depends entirely on how far you let the bread break down.
- "Stale" means dry, not oldDay-old bread with the crumb still sound. The point is that dry bread drinks the milk and holds its structure; fresh bread turns to paste and the pudding sets heavy.
- "An equal quantity of milk"Three cups of bread, so three cups of milk. Leave it to soak ten or fifteen minutes until the bread collapses under a spoon. Beat it smooth for a dense, custard-like pudding, or leave it rough if you want to see the bread in the finished cup.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in 1-ounce squares. Any unsweetened baking chocolate substitutes directly — two squares is 2 ounces. It is not cocoa powder and not bittersweet.
- Steam it, do not bake itCover the filled cups, stand them in a pan with simmering water coming halfway up their sides, and put a lid on the pan. Baked in a dry oven instead, the same mixture browns and dries at the edges and stops being this pudding.
- The steamed puddingHalf an hour in the steamer will bring small custard cups to a set; test that the centre is just firm and no longer liquid, around 170-175F, before turning out. Three cups of bread and three eggs makes six to eight cups' worth.
- Butter the cups properly"Well-buttered" is the instruction and it decides whether you can serve them turned out. Butter cold cups thoroughly, right up to the rim; the recipe offers serving in the cups as the alternative for good reason.
- A later printing makes it richerWalter Baker reprinted this recipe in 1924 with less bread, three-quarters of a cup of sugar instead of a half, and a tablespoonful of butter added. The original here is the leaner version, which is worth knowing if it tastes more austere than you expected.
Mrs. Helen Armstrong, who contributes this and the charlotte that follows it, was a cooking lecturer of the demonstration circuit rather than a school principal -- the kind of expert a newspaper hired to fill a hall, as the Washington Herald did in 1911 when it ran its own cooking school with her at the front showing off gas ranges. Her two contributions here sit at opposite ends of the period's range: a quart charlotte built on whipped cream and gelatine, and this, a bread pudding. Chocolate bread pudding is the older idea by far. Softening stale bread in milk and enriching it with eggs is one of the foundations of English and American domestic cookery, and what a booklet like this one adds is simply two squares of a branded chocolate, which is the whole reason the recipe is printed here.