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Toast Pudding
Take 3 slices of dry bread and toast to a nice brown, but do not burn. Butter each piece and put in a pudding dish.
Make a custard of 4 eggs (reserve whites of 2 for frosting), ½ cup granulated sugar, 1 pint sweet milk, 1 pint water, a pinch of salt, 1 tablespoon vanilla (or ½ teaspoon nutmeg). Pour over toast and bake. When baked, beat well the 2 egg whites with 1 teaspoon sugar and spread over top.
Put back in oven till a nice brown. Serve with milk or whipped cream.
A bread-and-custard pudding filed, oddly, under Boiled Puddings — it is baked throughout. The custard is unusually thin, which changes how you handle it.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 325-350F; a custard set faster than that curdles and weeps. Count on 45 to 60 minutes, until the centre is just barely wobbly and a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean.
- Use a water bathOne pint of milk cut with one pint of water gives a very loose custard with little insurance against overheating. Setting the pudding dish in a larger pan of hot water is the single change most worth making.
- Sweet milkMeans plain fresh milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk. Whole milk is closest to what the book assumed; the added water already thins it considerably, so do not use skim.
- That tablespoon of vanillaThree times what a modern cook would use. One to two teaspoons of current extract is ample. The nutmeg alternative is the recipe's own half teaspoon, freshly grated if possible.
- Toast placementToast well browned and buttered, then laid in a single layer, floats. Press it down into the custard and let it stand ten minutes before baking so it absorbs liquid rather than drying out on top.
- The meringueTwo whites with only a teaspoon of sugar makes a soft, foamy topping rather than a stable meringue — it will brown quickly and will not hold long. Spread it to the very edges of the dish and return to the oven for 8 to 12 minutes, or run it briefly under a broiler, watching constantly.
- Yield and servingRoughly a 1.5-quart dish; serves about six. Best warm, not hot; the custard firms as it cools. The recipe offers milk or whipped cream.
Toast puddings belong to the long family of thrift dishes built on stale bread — bread pudding, brown betty, poor knights — and the toasting step is not decoration but preservation logic: browning dry bread drives off remaining moisture and adds flavour before it is soaked back into liquid. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company from 1913 and distributed to purchasers of the company's flour, was compiled largely from recipes contributed by women who used it, which may account for the plain-spoken phrasing. The generous dilution of milk with water, and the meringue made from the reserved whites, both suggest an economising habit.