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Bread Pudding
Take about 4 slices of dry bread, spread with butter and put raisins between them. Take 1 egg, beat ½ cupful sugar, a little salt, and milk to cover the bread, a little nutmeg; set on the back of the stove and let it swell one hour, then bake one hour. Serve with cream and sugar, and a dish of quince jelly.
A plain soaked-bread custard with no oven temperature given and no pan size. The soak is the part that matters most; the rest is straightforward.
- The soak is the recipe"Set on the back of the stove and let it swell one hour" means the cool end of a wood range — barely warm, not cooking. A room-temperature counter for an hour does the same job. Skipping it leaves dry pockets of crust that never soften and a pudding that weeps.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, but a milk-and-egg custard wants a moderate oven, 350F. Any hotter and the egg curdles at the edges before the middle sets.
- How much milk"Milk to cover the bread" for four slices in a small dish is roughly 2 cups. That is a lean ratio against one egg — expect a soft, bready pudding rather than a sliceable custard. Two eggs gives a firmer set if you want one.
- Dish size and donenessA 1-quart baking dish suits this quantity. An hour at 350F is about right; it is done when a knife slid into the centre comes out clean and the top is puffed and lightly browned. A water bath is not required at this ratio but produces a smoother texture.
- The breadDry bread here means genuinely stale, a day or two old, sturdy enough to hold its shape after soaking. Fresh soft sandwich bread collapses into paste. Butter each slice and layer them with the raisins between, as written, rather than tearing everything into cubes.
- Nutmeg"A little" from a whole nutmeg grated fresh — perhaps a quarter teaspoon. Pre-ground nutmeg fades with keeping and tends to need a heavier hand for less result.
- Yield and servingFour modest servings. The cream is meant to be poured over unwhipped, and the quince jelly served alongside as a sharp counterpoint; redcurrant or crabapple jelly works the same way if quince is not to hand.
Bread pudding turns stale bread, which every household produced, into a dessert using only an egg, some milk and sugar. The technique is old and widespread across Europe, and English cookbooks were printing versions of it long before this one. The quince jelly at the end is the period detail worth noticing — quinces were a familiar dooryard fruit in nineteenth-century America and, being high in pectin and too hard and astringent for most people to eat raw, were commonly put up as jelly and preserves. Pairing that astringency with a bland sweet pudding is a sensible match rather than a flourish.