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Chocolate Pudding (For an Invalid)
A cup of milk, a scant cup of bread crumbs, one tablespoon of dry cocoa and same of sugar mixed together, yolk of one egg. Bake in moderate oven. Make a. meringue of the white and a tablespoon of pulverized sugar. Serve either hot or cold with milk.
A single-serving baked bread custard, thickened with crumbs rather than a large proportion of egg so it sets soft. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how a custard behaves; the notes below fill in what it leaves out.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F. At that heat a cup-sized pudding in a shallow dish takes roughly 30 to 35 minutes, until the centre is just set and no longer liquid when tilted.
- "Dry cocoa"This means unsweetened cocoa powder, not drinking chocolate or a sweetened mix. Natural (non-alkalised) cocoa is probably nearer what was meant, though the recipe does not distinguish; Dutch-process is darker and milder and works equally well here.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old white bread, torn or grated, not dry packaged crumbs. Dried commercial crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give a dense, pasty pudding rather than a soft one.
- Let it soakThe instruction the recipe omits: mix the crumbs with the milk, cocoa and sugar and leave them ten minutes before adding the yolk. Unsoaked crumbs float to the top and bake into a crust while the milk beneath stays thin.
- The meringueOne white with a tablespoon of powdered sugar beats to a very soft meringue. Spread it over the baked pudding and return it to the oven for 10 to 12 minutes at 350F, until set and lightly coloured; longer at higher heat will weep.
- YieldOne portion, or two small ones. Baked in a single ramekin or small pie dish, it suits the sickroom purpose the title implies.
- Serving with milkMilk served with the pudding, in the manner of a sauce; the recipe allows the pudding itself either hot or cold and does not specify the milk's temperature.
Nearly every general American cookbook of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried a chapter on invalid or sickroom cookery, because nursing the sick was work done at home and the cook was expected to feed the patient as well as the household. The governing principles were blandness, easy digestion and small quantities: single-egg dishes, milk, beef tea, gruels, toast water, arrowroot. A pudding like this one is a compromise between those rules and the patient's appetite -- chocolate for interest, bread crumbs to make the egg go further and produce something soft enough to eat with a spoon in bed. The meringue uses the white that would otherwise be left over. Cocoa suited the purpose particularly well: by this period it was widely available as a defatted powder and was generally regarded as more wholesome for the sick than chocolate in bar form, which carried its full complement of cocoa butter.