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Bread Pudding
Slice some stale bread, omitting the crust. Butter it moderately thick. Butter a deep dish, and cover the bottom with slices of bread, over which put a layer of any kind of preserved fruit. (Acid fruits are best.) Cover all with a light layer of brown sugar. Make a rich custard, allowing four eggs to a pint of milk. Pour it over the pudding, and bake an hour. Grate nutmeg over it, when done.--Mrs. Col. S.
A layered bread-and-jam pudding with a custard poured over it. The original assumes you know how hot to run the oven and how much bread a "deep dish" holds, so the useful work is in filling those gaps.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the recipe assumes a cook who judged her own oven. A custard-based pudding of this kind is best at 325-350F; much above that and the eggs are apt to curdle at the edges before the centre sets. An hour should suit that heat for a dish about 2 inches deep.
- The custard ratioFour eggs to a pint of milk is 4 eggs to 2 cups, which gives a firm, sliceable custard rather than a loose one. The recipe specifies nothing beyond "a rich custard"; whole eggs beaten and combined with the milk will answer, and given the brown sugar layer and the preserves you may want little or no sugar in the custard itself.
- Bake it in a water bathThe original omits this, but standing the dish in a roasting pan of hot water, filled about halfway up the outside, helps guard against a grainy set at this egg ratio.
- "Preserved fruit"This would generally have meant fruit put up at home in syrup rather than a modern jam. Modern jam works, but use it thinly, as it is sweeter and will make the layer soupy. The note that acid fruits are best is sound advice, as the tartness cuts the custard.
- Stale bread, butteredThe bread is sliced, decrusted and buttered before it goes in, slice by slice, as the recipe directs; the butter helps the bottom layer hold its shape. A day-old white loaf is what is intended, and a sturdy sandwich loaf will do. Letting the assembled dish stand 20-30 minutes before baking gives the bread time to drink the custard.
- Vessel and yieldA "deep dish" here is roughly a 1 1/2 to 2-quart baking dish. As written this will serve four to six, warm or at room temperature.
- Nutmeg lastThe recipe grates the nutmeg after baking rather than before. Use whole nutmeg on a fine grater, not pre-ground.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by "Two Hundred and Fifty of Virginia's Noted Housewives," is a book of attributed household recipes, and the initials at the end - Mrs. Col. S. - are the whole citation the reader was expected to need. Bread pudding of this sort is the direct descendant of English bread-and-butter pudding, which appears in print in English cookery books from the early eighteenth century onward; the Virginia version carries a layer of home-put-up fruit, which reflects a household that spent late summer filling jars and spent the rest of the year finding uses for them. The dish belongs to the same thrifty logic as trifle and charlotte: stale bread, an egg custard, and whatever preserve was open.