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Bread Pudding
1 cup stale bread crumbs (grated) 1 tablespoon (heaping) butter ½ cup white sugar 3 eggs 1 pint rich milk Flavoring to taste.
Cream butter and sugar. Add 3 yolks and 1 white well beaten, then the milk and flavoring. Then add the crumbs. Beat well and bake in oven like a custard. To be served with a little sweet cream.
Note-A few shreds of candied orange peel will give a delicious flavor to a bread pudding.
A thin, custard-style bread pudding rather than the dense bready kind — the ratio here is one cup of crumbs to a pint of milk, so treat it as a baked custard that happens to contain bread.
- Bake it like a custard, literallyThe book gives no temperature, time or method beyond "like a custard." Standard custard practice applies: set the dish in a pan of hot water and bake at a moderate oven, around 325-350F, until the centre is just set with a slight wobble — roughly 45 to 60 minutes. Baked dry and hot it will curdle and weep.
- "Rich milk"Turn-of-the-century milk came unhomogenised with the cream still on it. Use whole milk with about a quarter of it replaced by cream, or half-and-half, for the texture intended.
- Grated crumbsGrated means fine dry crumbs from genuinely stale bread, not soft torn pieces. Fine crumbs disperse into the custard; torn bread floats and gives a different pudding entirely.
- Three yolks, one whiteThe recipe calls for 3 yolks but only 1 white, leaving two whites over; no reason is given, though fewer whites will tend to give a softer, less rubbery set. The spare whites keep several days refrigerated, or go into a meringue.
- Flavoring to tasteRead this as vanilla, lemon zest, or nutmeg; a teaspoon of vanilla suits the quantity. The candied orange peel in the note wants shredding fine and stirring in with the crumbs.
- A heaping tablespoon of butterRoughly 20 g, against about 14 g for a modern level tablespoon. The recipe creams it with the sugar rather than melting it in.
- YieldFour to six small servings from a 1-quart dish. The "little sweet cream" poured over at table is unsweetened pouring cream, not whipped.
Bread puddings began as thrift: stale bread was too valuable to discard in households that baked their own, and enriching it with eggs, milk and sugar turned scraps into a company dish. The Five Roses book was a flour-miller's collection, compiled for Canadian home bakers largely from recipes sent in by customers. By that date the form had split in two, a heavy boiled or steamed pudding on one hand and a light baked custard of this kind on the other. The candied orange peel in the note is a small marker of period taste.