Home › Desserts-Puddings › Meringue Bread Pudding
Meringue Bread Pudding
1 pt. stale bread crumbs 1 C sugar 4 egg yolks, beaten light Mrs. Madole.
Grated rind 1 lemon Butter size of egg 1 qt. milk Mix above ingredients together and bake slowly one hour. Remove from oven and spread over the pudding one glass of currant jelly. Over the jelly spread a meringue made by beating 4 egg whites stiffly with 4 T sugar and few drops vanilla. Return to the oven to brown and serve with cream.
A straightforward baked bread custard finished with jelly and meringue. Only the archaic measures and the vague oven need translating.
- "Bake slowly"Period usage generally puts a slow oven somewhere around 300-325F, though the term was never precise. That range suits this pudding anyway: a custard baked hot will curdle and weep. A water bath is not called for but will make the set more even.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it into the scalded milk rather than dropping it in cold.
- A pint of crumbsVolume, not weight: a pint is 2 cups. The weight varies widely with how fine and how dry the crumbs are, so measure by volume rather than converting. Torn stale bread works as well as crumbs and gives more texture. Soaking it in the milk for fifteen minutes before the eggs go in prevents a dense layer at the bottom.
- One glass of currant jellyA jelly glass of the period held 6 to 8 ounces; a scant cup is generous for this size of pudding and half a cup spreads more easily. Warm the jelly slightly so it can be spread without tearing the surface of the set custard.
- Judging the custardAn hour is a fair estimate for a 2-quart dish, but go by set rather than clock: the center should jiggle as a unit and register 170-175F. Beyond that the eggs tighten and the pudding weeps.
- The meringueFour whites to 4 tablespoons sugar is a soft, old-style meringue -- it will brown fast and cut cleanly, but it will not hold overnight. Spread it onto the pudding while the pudding is still hot and seal the meringue to the rim of the dish; both steps keep liquid from pooling underneath.
- BrowningThe recipe assumes the pudding goes back into the same oven. If the meringue is slow to take color there, a hotter oven of 375-400F for 8-12 minutes, or a minute or two under a closely watched broiler, will brown it faster.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk and four eggs makes 8 servings in a 2- to 2.5-quart dish. "Serve with cream" means plain unwhipped heavy or light cream poured at the table.
Bread puddings of this type are frugality made presentable: stale bread, a quart of milk and a few eggs stretched into a dessert for eight, then dressed up with jelly and a meringue lid so it could go on a company table. The three-layer treatment -- custard base, preserve, meringue -- is the same architecture as English queen of puddings, which nineteenth-century American cookbooks appear to have absorbed and reprinted under various names. Currant jelly was often the choice because currants were widely grown in home gardens and jellied reliably without added pectin; the tart red layer cut the sweetness of both custard and meringue. Cookbooks of this kind collected such recipes under contributors' names, and the shorthand here -- butter the size of an egg, one glass of jelly, bake slowly -- assumes a cook who already knew what a set custard looked like and needed only the proportions.