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Remove crusts from bread and cut into five slices of uniform thickness. Spread generously with butter, arrange in baking-dish, pour over three cups of milk and molasses. Bake from two to three hours in a very slow oven, stirring three times during the first hour of baking, then add remaining milk. Serve with cream or vanilla ice cream.
A long, slow baked bread pudding in the Indian-pudding family, sweetened with molasses rather than sugar and eggs. It rewards patience and a low oven more than technique.
- A very slow ovenPeriod usage puts a very slow oven at roughly 250-300F. The point is that the milk thickens against the bread without boiling; a much hotter oven will darken the top before the two hours are up.
- The stirring is the hingeBreaking up the bread three times in the first hour is what turns this from soggy slices into a more homogeneous pudding. The recipe gives no further stirring after the remaining milk goes in.
- The milk quantities are incompleteThree cups of "milk and molasses" go in at the start and an unspecified "remaining milk" is added after the first hour; the original never says how much, nor whether the three cups are milk alone. A further cup or so is a reasonable guess.
- MolassesNo quantity is given. Half a cup of unsulphured molasses is a workable guess for this volume; blackstrap is markedly more bitter and would want less, if used at all.
- BreadStale, close-crumbed white bread cut about half an inch thick absorbs best. Fresh sandwich bread collapses to paste and modern airy loaves need an extra slice or two to give the same body.
- Baking-dishA two-quart earthenware or glass dish suits the quantity. The recipe does not say whether to cover it, though the repeated stirring implies it is left open.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings; five slices of bread would make four to six modest portions.
Milk, molasses and a slow oven are familiar to the New England pudding tradition, and this is a bread-based relation of Indian pudding. Molasses was widely used as a sweetener in the northern states before cheap refined sugar, and a long bake at falling heat suited a wood-fired range. The suggestion to serve it with vanilla ice cream points to a comparatively late date, after commercial ice cream became easy to buy.