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Chocolate Bread Pudding
1 cup stale bread crumbs. 2 cups milk 1 tablespoon (heaping) butter 1 tablespoon (heaping) grated chocolate ½ cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 3 eggs (beaten separately).
Put on fire and heat to boiling point the bread crumbs and milk; then add butter, grated chocolate, sugar and flavoring. Take from fire and cool. Stir in the beaten yolks and, lastly, fold in the stiff whites. Put in a buttered dish and bake.
Serve with cream.
A crumb custard rather than a bread pudding in the cubed-and-soaked sense, and despite its place in the boiled puddings chapter the instruction is to bake it. Treat it as a baked custard and the rest follows.
- The hinge: cool before the yolksThe milk mixture must come down well below scalding before the yolks go in, or they set into threads. Let it sit until barely warm to the finger, then stir them through.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A custard of this kind wants 350F; set the dish in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides to keep the edges from curdling before the centre sets.
- Baking time and donenessReckon on 40 to 50 minutes in a 1-quart dish. It is done when the outer inch is set and the middle still trembles as a single mass; it firms further as it cools.
- Grated chocolateA heaping tablespoon of chocolate grated from a block points to unsweetened block or cake chocolate. Grated, it is light by volume, so this is a small quantity, well under an ounce. Chopped fine or grated it melts into the hot milk; chocolate chips are formulated to hold their shape and are the wrong thing here.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn or grated from day-old white bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which are far denser by volume and will give a heavy pudding. Crumb loosely into the cup without packing.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThe whites are beaten stiff, as the recipe directs, and folded in last; they lighten the custard rather than leaven it. Fold in two additions and stop while a few streaks remain.
- Yield and servingFour to five small servings. "Cream" here is plain unwhipped pouring cream, offered cold against the warm pudding.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Canada as a promotional volume for its flour. The direction to grate the chocolate is a reminder that domestic chocolate came as a hard unsweetened block or cake well into the twentieth century, to be shaved on a grater as needed; the half cup of sugar in the custard is doing all of the sweetening.