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Quick Pudding
Take dry cake enough to cover the bottom of a small basin. Beat 2 eggs in a Put bowl with 2 tablespoons of sugar, a little salt and nutmeg. Fill up the bowl with sweet milk and turn over the cake. in oven just long enough to set the custard and it is ready to serve.
A stale-cake custard, printed with the typesetting jumbled — the phrase "Put ... in oven" has been broken across the sentence about filling the bowl. Read it as: line the basin with cake, beat the custard, pour it over, bake until just set.
- Scale and vesselA "small basin" is probably a pudding basin of something like 2 to 3 cups. Two eggs and enough milk to fill the bowl would work out at roughly a cup or so of milk, close to the usual custard ratio of one egg per half cup. Enough for two, or three at a stretch.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century books distinguish sweet milk from sour or buttermilk. It means ordinary fresh whole milk; nothing is added to it.
- Dry cakeStale plain sponge, pound cake or unfrosted layer cake, cut or crumbled to line the bottom. Iced or heavily fruited cake muddies the custard. If the cake is very fresh, dry the slices in a low oven first so they absorb rather than dissolve.
- OvenThe book assumes you know; use 325°F. Custard baked hotter than about 350°F curdles and weeps, and the small quantity here heats fast.
- Water bathNot mentioned, but set the basin in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up. Without it the outside of so small a custard sets long before the centre does.
- "Just long enough to set"About 25 to 35 minutes. The custard is done when the edge is firm and the centre still trembles as a single mass; a knife an inch from the side comes out clean. It carries on setting out of the oven.
- SeasoningTwo tablespoons of sugar for two eggs is restrained by modern taste — the cake supplies the rest of the sweetness. Grate the nutmeg over the surface at the end rather than beating it in, so it toasts.
Puddings built on stale cake or bread were the ordinary answer to a household that baked its own and threw nothing away; the custard is simply the binder that makes yesterday's crumb serviceable again. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and its collected contributions from Canadian housewives run heavily to this kind of thrift -- small quantities, no exact oven, an assumption that the cook has cake going dry in the pantry. "Quick" here presumably means quick relative to the steamed and boiled puddings of the period, which wanted two or three hours in the pot rather than half an hour in the oven.