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Chocolate Pudding
10 tablespoonfuls bread crumbs, 6 tablespoonfuls grated chocolate, 1 pint milk, 1 pint sugar, yolks of 6 eggs, whites of 2 eggs. Boil the bread crumbs and chocolate in the milk till it begins to thicken, stirring it meantime. Then cool, stir in the yolks and the whites, which have previously been beaten well with the sugar. Bake for one-half hour. Cover with meringue made of sugar and the whites of 4 eggs. Brown in the oven.
A bread-crumb custard rather than a cake, thickened on the stove first and then set in the oven under a meringue. The critical step is the cooling before the yolks go in.
- Cool before adding eggsThe crumb-and-chocolate milk must drop below scalding or the yolks will scramble into threads. Let it stand until barely warm, then temper a ladleful into the beaten yolks before combining.
- Grated chocolateThis usually means plain block chocolate, grated on a coarse grater, though period cakes of chocolate were sometimes sweetened. Six tablespoonfuls of gratings is roughly 1.5 to 2 oz; chopped bar chocolate or 60 percent chips will work, but reduce the sugar if they are already sweetened.
- A pint of sugarMeasured as a pint, that is about 2 cups, near 14 oz. It reads very high for a pudding of this size, and some of it may have been intended for the meringue, which the recipe never quantifies. Use about 1 cup in the custard and 2 tablespoons per egg white for the meringue.
- Bread crumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not the soft fresh sort and not seasoned packaged crumbs. Ten tablespoonfuls is a little over half a cup.
- Oven temperatureFor an unstated bake of this kind, 350F. Half an hour in a buttered 2-quart dish should leave the centre just set with a slight tremble; a water bath gives a smoother custard.
- Browning the meringueSpread the meringue to the very edge of the dish so it seals, and return it to a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes until tan. A hotter oven browns the peaks before the interior of the meringue is cooked.
- Egg countSix yolks, two whites in the pudding, four whites in the meringue: six eggs total, nothing wasted. Beat the meringue whites to soft peaks before adding sugar gradually.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Serve warm or at room temperature; the meringue weeps if refrigerated overnight.
Bread-crumb puddings were a common household dessert in the nineteenth century, a way of turning stale loaf into something company-worthy. Chocolate reached the household as a dense hard cake, which is likely why the recipe says grated rather than melted: grating was how you got it to disperse in milk. A meringue lid was a familiar finish for baked puddings and custards of the period, and it neatly consumed the whites left over from a yolk-rich pudding. Recipes of this sort often state quantities in tablespoonfuls and pints.