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Chocolate Pudding (With Bread and Eggs)
To a quart of milk, allow a pint of fine bread, slices of bread or their equivalent in small pieces; crusts and "heels" may be used. Add three eggs, one small cup of sugar, and two squares of chocolate melted, or three heaping teaspoons of cocoa, stirred dry with the sugar. Beat all together well and flavor with one teaspoon of vanilla, or one-half teaspoon of ground cinnamon, and half a teaspoon of salt. Bake in a buttered dish. Excellent hot or cold, and requires no sauce. Baked in custard cups and served cold with whipped cream, this is delicious.
A plain bread-and-custard pudding with chocolate worked in; the original gives no oven temperature and no baking time, which is where most of the guesswork lies.
- Oven and timeBake at 325-350F. A quart-sized dish takes roughly 50-60 minutes; individual custard cups 30-35. It is done when the center is just set and a knife an inch from the middle comes out clean — the very center should still wobble slightly.
- Use a water bathThis is a custard held together by three eggs in a quart of milk, which is a lean ratio. Setting the dish in a pan of hot water keeps the edges from curdling before the middle sets.
- "A pint of fine bread"Volume, not weight: two cups of crumbs or small torn pieces, roughly 3-4 oz if the bread is soft and torn; dry fine crumbs at the same volume weigh appreciably more. The recipe allows for stale bread, crusts and "heels"; fresh soft sandwich bread tends toward paste.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. The cocoa substitution given here is not equivalent in fat; the cocoa version bakes drier and slightly firmer.
- Stir cocoa with the sugarIf using cocoa, follow the instruction literally. Dry cocoa dropped into milk clumps and stays clumped; rubbed through the sugar first it disperses.
- Soak before bakingLet the assembled mixture stand 15-20 minutes so the bread absorbs the custard. Otherwise the bread floats and bakes into a dry cap over a layer of set milk.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon in a quart of milk is right and should not be cut; it is what keeps the chocolate from tasting flat.
- YieldServes six generously, or fills about eight standard custard cups.
Bread puddings of this kind were the standard answer to the problem the recipe names outright — crusts and "heels," the ends of the loaf nobody wanted. Baking them into a milk-and-egg custard was thrift dressed as dessert, and cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry dozens of variants. The chocolate is the newer element: unsweetened baking chocolate in one-ounce squares and tinned cocoa powder were both widely sold grocery goods in American kitchens by the later nineteenth century. The offhand note that it needs no sauce is worth reading as written — hot puddings were often sent to the table with a hard sauce or a sweet pour, and the chocolate here may be doing that job instead.