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Original Pudding (Crumb up four rolls Pour over)
Crumb up four rolls. Pour over them a quart of fresh milk at the breakfast table. A half hour before dinner, beat up separately the yolks and whites of six eggs. After beating, put them together and stir them up. Take a piece of butter the size of a walnut, cut it in bits and throw it on top. Sauce. Throw in a bowl, a tablespoonful of flour and a large piece of butter. Cream it round and round. Add two teacups of sugar, one wine-glass of light wine, and nutmeg, and boil up.-Miss R. S.
A plain baked bread pudding written for a cook who already knew what a pudding dish looked like and how long one stayed in the oven. The recipe assumes both, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- The soaking is the pointThe rolls go into the milk at breakfast and sit until half an hour before dinner, full several hours. That long soak is what turns bread into custard rather than wet crumbs; do not shorten it to twenty minutes.
- Four rollsRoll sizes varied; if you reckon a small dinner roll at around 2 oz, four give roughly 8 oz of bread, though the original gives no weight. A quart of milk is a generous amount of liquid for that quantity of crumbs.
- No oven instruction is givenThe original never says to bake it, though some cooking must be intended. A buttered 2-quart dish at 350F for 45 to 55 minutes, until the centre is set and barely trembles, is a workable modern guess rather than anything the recipe states.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly one to two tablespoons; a walnut was a common informal gauge for small quantities of butter. Scattered on top it browns the surface.
- Eggs beaten separatelyYolks and whites are beaten apart and then, as the recipe says, put together and stirred up. Separate beating adds air, there being no other leavening.
- Teacup and wine-glassA teacup is usually reckoned somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup, so two teacups of sugar is somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 cups. The pudding itself contains no sugar at all. A wine-glass is about 2 fluid ounces.
- The sauceButter creamed with a tablespoon of flour, then sugar, wine and nutmeg added and the whole boiled to thicken. With only a wine-glass of liquid it will come out very thick unless you add more.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Serve warm, with the sauce made while the pudding bakes.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from some 250 ladies of Virginia and her sister states, which is why so many entries close with initials like "Miss R. S." rather than a full name. Bread puddings of this kind were the standard use for the previous day's rolls in households that baked bread daily and threw nothing away, and the structure here — stale bread, milk, eggs, a sweet wine sauce carrying all the sugar — is the English boiled-and-baked pudding tradition transplanted more or less intact. The recipe calls only for "light wine," and the sauce may suggest a pudding meant for company rather than a nursery dish, though that reading is speculative. The title "Original Pudding" is often taken to mean the contributor's own version rather than a claim of invention.