Home › Sweets › Pouding Chaud à la Chocolat
Pouding Chaud à la Chocolat
(Hot Chocolate Pudding.) Ingredients.
Three Eggs. Quarter of a pound of Chocolate.
Half a pint of Milk.
Seven ounces of Breadcrumbs.
Three ounces of Butter.
Three ounces of Sugar.
This entry gives quantities only — the method has not survived on the page — so treat it as a proportion list for a hot breadcrumb-and-chocolate pudding rather than a set of instructions. The proportions themselves are sound and typical of the period.
- The missing methodAs printed there is no procedure: the usual handling for this set of ingredients is to melt the chocolate in the scalded milk, pour it over the crumbs to swell, beat in creamed butter and sugar, then steam or bake in a buttered mould. Nothing in the list tells you which, so any cook working from it is reconstructing, not following.
- No eggsMany comparable hot puddings of the period include eggs to bind and lift. Whether their absence here is a printing omission or intended cannot be told from the page; without eggs the mixture would set as a dense chocolate paste rather than a light pudding.
- Half a pintBritish imperial measure: 10 fl oz, or a scant 1¼ US cups, not 8 fl oz. The difference matters when the liquid has to be absorbed by a fixed weight of crumbs.
- The chocolate"Chocolate" in a book of this kind most likely means a plain block eating or cooking chocolate, coarser than modern couverture and variable in sweetness. A dark chocolate of around 60–70% is a reasonable modern substitute.
- BreadcrumbsSeven ounces is a lot of crumb, and fresh soft white crumbs from a day-old loaf are the likeliest reading rather than the dry sandy crumb sold for coating. Dry packaged crumbs will drink the milk and give a heavy, gritty result.
- Steaming versus bakingThe list does not say which. Steamed in a covered buttered basin such a pudding stays moist; baked it will be drier and want a sauce, and a rich chocolate mixture scorches easily at the sides without a water bath. Any timing or oven setting is a modern suggestion, not the book's.
- ServingThese quantities would fill roughly a 1½-pint basin, or several small moulds. A custard or thin chocolate sauce suits so dense a hot pudding, though the page says nothing about how it was served.
French menu titles on English puddings were a mark of the professional kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century — pouding chaud simply means hot pudding, and the awkward à la chocolat (correctly au chocolat) suggests a compiler more fluent in cooking than in French. The dish itself belongs to the long English line of breadcrumb puddings, in which stale bread carries the flavouring and the fat, a habit of thrift that survived into grand cookery long after thrift stopped being the point. Chocolate reached this stage of the meal comparatively late: through most of the nineteenth century it was chiefly a drink, and it was the wider availability of solid eating and cooking blocks in the second half of the century that let it move into hot puddings, soufflés and creams of exactly this kind.