Home › Pudding Recipes › Pudding
Pudding
3/4 cup (3 ozs.) bread crumbs 2 tablespoonfuls butter 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) sugar 1/2 pint (1 cup) milk Few drops lemon juice 1/2 teaspoonful orange extract 1/2 pint (I cup) milk 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 2 eggs ozs.) sugar Put the sugar and lemon juice into a saucepan and boil to a caramel, then when cool pour in the milk and stand the mixture at the side of the stove until the sugar is dissolved, but do not let it boil; fry the bread crumbs in the butter until a golden brown, then pour on them the prepared milk, and beat into them the yolks of eggs, the orange extract, and the whites of eggs stiffly beaten. stirring constantly; then add the extracts. Pour into the prepared crust, cover with a meringue made by beating up the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth and adding two heaping tablespoonfuls of sugar and half a teaspoonful of vanilla extract to them.
Set in the oven to brown.
The text as printed is a collision of two recipes — a caramel crumb custard and a meringue-topped pie — and several ingredient lines have dropped out of the list entirely. Read it as a method sketch rather than a formula, and expect to supply quantities yourself.
- Missing ingredientsBread crumbs, butter and a pastry crust all appear in the instructions but never in the ingredient list. You will have to supply the quantities yourself; something on the order of a cup of dry crumbs and a tablespoon or two of butter would suit this amount of milk.
- The eggs are counted twiceTwo eggs are listed. The method beats the yolks into the milk, folds in the stiffly beaten whites, and then calls for a meringue made from "the whites of the eggs" — impossible with two eggs. Either fold the whites into the pudding and skip the meringue, or reserve both whites for the top and thicken with yolks only.
- Half a pintOne cup, as the original helpfully notes. Two heaping tablespoonfuls of sugar is given as 2 ounces, which is closer to a level quarter cup than to two spoonfuls in modern practice.
- Caramel with lemon juiceThe acid helps invert some of the sugar and discourages crystallising. Boil the sugar and juice to a deep amber; note that the recipe has you let the caramel cool before pouring in the milk, which also avoids the spattering that comes of adding cold liquid to hot caramel.
- Do not let it boilThe instruction applies to the caramel and milk standing at the side of the stove: the hardened sugar should dissolve without the milk coming to a boil. Keeping the mixture off the boil matters again once the yolks are beaten in, since boiling will curdle them and turn the pudding grainy.
- Frying the crumbsBrowning the crumbs in butter before soaking them keeps them from collapsing into paste and adds a nutty note that plain soaked bread lacks. Golden brown, not dark; they will continue to colour off the heat.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperature. "Set in the oven to brown" asks only for enough heat to colour the meringue; a moderate oven for a short time is the safe reading, since a hotter oven browns the surface before the interior sets.
- YieldA cup of milk and two eggs is a small quantity, enough for a small dish or a shallow shell and two or three helpings at most.
Caramel bread puddings belong to a long line of thrift dishes that turned stale loaf ends into dessert, dressed up here with burnt sugar and a meringue lid to make them fit for company. The orange and vanilla extracts suggest a period in which bottled flavouring essences were cheap and reliable enough for household cooks to reach for them instead of grating peel. The garbled state of this particular page -- two sets of instructions run together, ingredients missing -- looks like a transcription artefact rather than anything in the original setting.