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Bread and Butter Pudding
Butter stale bread (made from Five Roses flour). Place a layer of bread and butter in bottom of pudding dish. Strew raisins and currants over this, then lay another layer of bread and butter with another layer of fruit over it. Have bread and butter on top. Make a custard of 2 eggs to 3 cups of milk and½ cup sugar.
Pour this over pudding, and bake in slow oven for 1½1/2 hours.
Note-When using stale bread for puddings, always soak it in cold liquid.
Bread that has been soaked in cold milk or water will be crumbly and light, whereas if soaked in hot liquid it will be heavy.
A plain custard-soaked bread pudding from a flour-company cookbook, with the useful detail that the soaking liquid must be cold. A few notes on temperature and proportion.
- Slow ovenA slow oven in this period is usually reckoned somewhere around 250-325F; take 300F as a working figure. At that heat, 1½ hours suits a deep dish; the pudding is done when a knife slid into the centre comes out clean and the custard no longer sloshes.
- The hinge: cold liquidThe note at the end is the whole technique. Pour the custard over cold, and it is worth letting the dish stand 20-30 minutes before baking so the bread drinks it up evenly. The book's own explanation is simply that bread soaked in cold milk or water comes out crumbly and light, while hot liquid makes it heavy.
- A lean custardTwo eggs to 3 cups milk is a thin ratio by current practice and can weep or stay loose. Four eggs to 3 cups milk gives a custard that slices.
- Water bathThe original bakes direct, which at 300F usually works. If your oven runs hot or uneven, set the dish in a pan of hot water to keep the edges from curdling before the middle sets.
- Stale breadMeans genuinely dry day-old bread, not mouldy. Modern soft sandwich loaf turns to paste; use a firm white loaf, or dry the slices in a low oven for ten minutes first.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red currants. Interchangeable here with raisins if you cannot find them.
- Quantities left openNo bread, butter or fruit amounts are given. For a 2-quart dish reckon on 8-10 slices, butter enough to coat one side of each, and about 1 cup of mixed raisins and currants.
- YieldServes about six, warm, with cream or a thin sweet sauce.
Bread and butter pudding is the household answer to a stale loaf, and it appears in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, long before it reached a Canadian flour promotion like this one. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to buyers of its flour, which explains the parenthetical instruction that the stale bread be made from Five Roses in the first place. What makes the entry worth keeping is the closing note contrasting cold and hot soaking liquid. The dish belongs to a broad family of thrift puddings, alongside brown betty and queen of puddings, that turned the unavoidable surplus of a home-baked or daily-delivered loaf into a dessert rather than waste.