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Bread Pudding (Pint milk cups stale bread cut)
1 pint milk 1 1/4 cups stale bread cut into dice 1/4 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/3 cup stoned dates cut into small pieces A few grains salt Heat the milk. Add the diced bread to the hot milk. Separate the whites from the yolks of the eggs. Beat the yolks. Mix some of the hot milk with the beaten yolks, then mix the yolks with the hot milk and bread. Add the sugar, salt, and dates. Put into a small basin, set the basin in a pan of hot water, and bake till the pudding is set. Then beat the egg whites and fold into them three tablespoons sugar. Spread this on top of the pudding, and put in the oven to brown lightly. Three eggs are sufficient for twice this recipe, using two of the whites for meringue. Queen of Puddings is made by spreading jelly over the top of the bread pudding before putting on the meringue, and putting one fourth cup chopped almonds in the pudding instead of the dates.
A plain baked bread custard with a meringue lid — the sort of small-batch pudding a cooking-school text used to teach custard setting. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat: this is a custard first and a bread dish second.
- Oven temperatureBake at 325–350F. The recipe gives none because the water bath is doing the regulating, but above about 350F the eggs curdle at the edges before the centre sets.
- The basin and water bathA "small basin" is a deep round pudding bowl; the recipe gives no size, but the quantities here need something nearer a quart, with room left above for the meringue. Any similar ovenproof dish works. Set it in a pan and pour in hot water to come halfway up the sides.
- Tempering the yolksThe instruction to mix some hot milk into the beaten yolks before returning them to the pan is the step people skip. Skipping it gives you threads of cooked egg through the pudding.
- How to tell it is setExpect 35–50 minutes depending on the depth of the dish. It is done when a knife inserted an inch from the centre comes out clean and the middle still trembles slightly; it firms as it cools.
- Browning the meringueThree tablespoons sugar to two whites is a soft meringue, not a stiff one. Return it to the oven only until the peaks colour — five to eight minutes at 350F, or a couple of minutes under a broiler with the door open and your eye on it.
- DatesStoned dates are pitted dates. Buy them pitted and check for stray stones; a third of a cup chopped is about 2 oz.
- BreadStale means dry and firm, not mouldy. A day-old plain white loaf, crusts on or off as you like, cut into roughly half-inch dice.
- YieldAs written this makes a small pudding, two to four servings depending on how it is portioned. The note about three eggs is telling you that doubling the recipe does not require doubling the eggs — four is more custard than the milk needs.
- Queen of PuddingsFor the variation, spread a thin layer of jelly over the set pudding, then the meringue on top of that. Doing it while the pudding is still warm helps the jelly slacken and spread.
Bread puddings begin as thrift — a way of turning the dry end of a loaf into a hot dish — and this one shows the technique after the cooking schools had taken it in hand. The measured cups, the diced rather than torn bread, and the water bath belong to the American domestic-science tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which treated a bread pudding as a custard exercise with a set method rather than a way of using up scraps. The Queen of Puddings variant given at the end is the English form of the same dish, usually associated with Victorian kitchens, where a layer of jam or jelly between custard and meringue is characteristic.