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Custard Pudding
Cut thin slices of bread. Butter them, and lay them in a baking-dish. Mix a cold custard of three pints of milk, the yolks of eight or ten eggs, beaten light; sweeten to your taste; pour over the bread; bake, and let it stand to cool. Froth and sweeten the whites, pour them over the top of the pudding, and then put it in the stove a few minutes more to brown on top.-Mrs. R.
A bread-and-butter custard with a meringue lid, written for a cook who already knew how custard behaves. The only real risk is heat: baked custard that goes above a gentle oven curdles and weeps.
- Quantities in modern termsThree pints is 6 cups of milk; with 8-10 yolks this is a soft, rich custard rather than a firm one. "Sweeten to your taste" for this volume means roughly 3/4 cup sugar; the meringue takes about 2 tablespoons of sugar per white.
- BreadA plain, slightly stale white loaf or brioche, sliced thin and buttered on one side. Fresh bread turns to paste; day-old holds its shape and absorbs the custard without dissolving.
- "Put it in the stove" means the ovenIn many nineteenth-century American cookbooks "stove" can stand for the oven of a closed range, and that is almost certainly the sense here, since the pudding has just been baked. Nothing is cooked on a burner.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the range had none. Bake the custard at 325F, ideally in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the dish. The meringue browns at 375-400F in four to six minutes, watched closely.
- The hinge: do not let the custard boilPull it when the edges are set and the center still trembles, about 45-60 minutes depending on the depth of the dish; an instant-read thermometer should show 170-175F. Past that the eggs tighten and the pudding leaks a thin gray liquid.
- Why it cools firstThe recipe says to let it stand to cool, though it does not say why. One likely reason is that meringue spread on a hot custard can slide, while a cooled surface holds it.
- Meringue"Froth" the whites to soft peaks, then beat the sugar in a spoonful at a time to firm, glossy peaks. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which stops it pulling away as it sets.
- YieldSix cups of custard fills a 9x13 dish or a 2 1/2-quart baking dish and serves ten to twelve. It is best the day it is made; the meringue weeps in the refrigerator.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of recipes signed with an initial like this one, and the format tells you as much as the dish does: instructions passed between women who all already knew the technique, so only the proportions needed writing down. The pudding itself belongs to the long English line of bread-and-butter puddings that reached the colonies in the eighteenth century, a way of making stale bread into a company dessert with eggs, milk and sugar. The separated eggs are the economical part of the design: the yolks enrich the custard, the whites, which would otherwise be wasted, become the browned topping.