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Chocolate Bread Pudding
Soak two cups of bread crumbs in two cups of scalded mlik, add two-thirds cup of sugar, two squares of chocolate previously melted, one teaspoon of vanilla. Mix well and bake in a buttered dish one hour in a moderate oven.
Serve hot with whipped cream or hard sauce.
A plain custard-less bread pudding that relies on the bread and milk alone for body. It works, but a few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this calls for 2 oz total. Do not substitute semisweet or chips without cutting the sugar, since the recipe's two-thirds cup is calculated against bitter chocolate.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (period ranges run 350-375F). One hour at that temperature in a buttered dish is about right; the centre should be just set and no longer soupy when tipped.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old white bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which will absorb the milk into paste. Two cups of soft crumbs is roughly three or four slices with the crusts left on.
- Scalded milkHeating the milk to just below a simmer is usually explained as a way of checking souring organisms in unpasteurised milk; it also softens the crumbs faster and helps the chocolate go in smoothly. With modern milk you can warm it just enough for that last purpose.
- No eggsThere is no egg here, so the pudding sets by the swollen bread and evaporation rather than by coagulation. It will be soft and spoonable rather than sliceable. Two beaten eggs stirred into the cooled milk will give a firmer, more custard-like result if you want one.
- SaltThe original omits it. A quarter teaspoon makes a substantial difference to how the chocolate reads.
- A water bath helpsSet the dish in a pan of hot water if your oven runs hot or bakes unevenly, which keeps the edges from drying to a crust before the middle sets.
- YieldFour to six servings. Hard sauce is butter creamed with powdered sugar and a spirit or vanilla, served cold in a spoonful on the hot pudding.
Bread pudding was a standard American use for stale loaf ends long before it was a dessert anyone ordered by choice, and chocolate versions turn up across turn-of-the-century household manuals as chocolate became cheaper and more consistent for everyday baking. The ounce 'square' of unsweetened chocolate that this recipe measures by was a manufacturers' convention: cakes of baking chocolate were scored into squares so a cook could break off a unit without weighing, and American recipes went on calling for squares well into the twentieth century. That the pudding contains no eggs suits an economy in which eggs were seasonal and costly and the bread was already paid for. The 'mlik' is an error in the text as transcribed here.