“The innkeeper was delighted and treated her like a lady, giving her roast fowl, black pudding, leg of mutton and bacon and cabbage. But she ate next to nothing. She had always been a small eater, and had generally lived on a little soup and a crust of bread and butter.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
1 small baker’s stale loaf Butter 3 eggs ½ cup sugar ¼ teaspoon salt 1 quart milk Remove end crusts from bread, cut loaf in one-half inch slices, spread each slice generously with butter; arrange in buttered pudding-dish, buttered side down. Beat eggs slightly, add sugar, salt, and milk; strain, and pour over bread; let stand thirty minutes. Bake one hour in slow oven, covering the first half-hour of baking. The top of pudding should be well browned. Serve with Hard or Creamy Sauce. Three-fourths cup raisins, parboiled in boiling water to cover and seeded, may be sprinkled between layers of bread.
Sources: The passage is from Guy de Maupassant, Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant, tr. Henderson, A. E., free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Farmer, The Boston cooking-school cook book of 1896, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — slate cloth, pudding stamp.