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Sippet Pudding
Butter a baking-dish, cut slices of light bread very thin, buttering them before cutting. Put them in the dish, strewing over each separate layer, currants, citron, raisins, and sugar. When the dish is full, pour over it an unboiled custard of milk and eggs, sweetened to the taste. Saturate the bread completely with this, then pour on a glass of brandy and bake a light brown. This pudding is very nice made of stale pound or sponge cake instead of light bread.--Mrs. M. C. C.
MRS. SPENCE'S PUDDING. (Original.) One pint grated bread crumbs put into one quart fresh sweet milk. Beat the yolks of five eggs very light. Add one teacup of sugar to them. Stir in the milk and crumbs and add three-quarters of a pound clipped raisins and one-quarter of a pound sliced citron. Season with mace. Bake nicely. Whip the whites of the five eggs to a stiff froth. Add one teacup pulverized sugar and season with extract of vanilla Put this over the pudding and set in the stove again to brown it slightly. Serve hot with a rich sauce made of sugar and butter seasoned with nutmeg and Madeira wine.
Two bread puddings run together on one page: a layered sippet pudding built on buttered bread slices, and Mrs. Spence's, which is a crumb custard finished with meringue. Both are baked custards, so the temperature matters more than the timing.
- SippetsA sippet is a thin slice or finger of bread, the same word used for the toast strips served with soup. Here it simply means the bread should be cut thin enough to soak through rather than sit in the custard as a raft.
- "Light bread"In Virginia usage this is ordinary yeast-raised white loaf bread, as opposed to cornbread or soda-risen quick bread. A day-old plain white sandwich loaf or a soft brioche-style bread works; anything sour or heavily seeded fights the custard.
- Oven heatNeither recipe gives a temperature. Bake either at 325-350F until the centre is just set and no longer liquid when the dish is tilted, roughly 45 minutes to an hour for a 2-quart dish. Higher heat curdles the custard and weeps.
- "A glass of brandy"A bare "glass" in nineteenth-century receipts is usually taken to mean a wine glass, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. It goes in unheated over the soaked bread; some, though by no means all, of the alcohol will cook off in baking.
- TeacupA teacup in nineteenth-century receipts is smaller than a modern measuring cup and is usually reckoned at about 6 fluid ounces, so roughly three-quarters of a cup of sugar for the custard and the same again for the meringue.
- Custard proportionsThe first pudding leaves the number of eggs to the cook. For a quart of milk, five to six whole eggs gives a custard that sets firmly around the bread without becoming rubbery.
- Clipped raisins and citron"clipped" most likely means snipped with scissors, stems removed and the fruit cut open, though the receipt does not explain the term. Modern seedless raisins need only a soak in warm water or the brandy. Candied citron is still sold at holiday baking counters; candied orange peel is a fair substitute.
- Mace and the meringueMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sharp than the nut itself; use about half a teaspoon ground for the quart of milk. Add the sweetened whites only after the pudding has set, then return it to a 350F oven for 8-10 minutes to colour.
- The sauceSugar and butter beaten with nutmeg and Madeira is most likely a hard sauce, left cold so that it melts over the hot pudding, though sauces of this description were also served warm. About a stick of softened butter to a cup of powdered sugar, with Madeira to taste.
- YieldEither version fills a 2-quart baking dish and serves eight, more if the sauce is generous.
Bread puddings of this kind are the tail end of a very long English tradition of stretching stale bread with milk, eggs and dried fruit, and the layered version here is essentially a plainer relative of the old buttered whitepot. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered receipts from named contributors across the state, which is why the page carries both "Mrs. M. C. C." and "Mrs. Spence's Pudding (Original.)" The casual instruction to use stale pound or sponge cake instead of bread is a reminder that these were thrift dishes at heart, even when dressed with citron, brandy and Madeira; the imported fruit and fortified wine mark the household as a comfortable one, but the pudding still begins with something that would otherwise have gone dry in the safe.