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Bread Pudding
2 cups bread crumbs 4 cups milk 3 eggs cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter cinnamon and nutmeg Soak bread in milk; add beaten eggs and remaining ingredients. Bake one hour. Serve with hard sauce.
A plain custard-based pudding from Lowney's, printed with the terseness of a book that assumed you already knew how bread pudding behaves. Two things are missing from the text: the oven temperature and, thanks to a dropped fraction, the sugar quantity.
- The missing sugar figureThe line reads "cup sugar" where the original almost certainly printed a fraction. For 4 cups of milk and 3 eggs, 1/2 cup is the conventional amount and gives a lightly sweet pudding; a full cup is not wrong but reads as dessert-sweet. Take the quantity as genuinely uncertain rather than settled.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A milk-and-egg custard of this size wants 325-350F for the stated hour. Above 375F the eggs tighten and weep, leaving a watery layer under a curdled top.
- Bake it in a water bathThe recipe does not call for one, but setting the dish in a larger pan with an inch of hot water helps the custard set evenly. Without it the edges can firm up ahead of the centre, though a crumb pudding is more forgiving than a plain baked custard.
- Test for doneness, not the clockAn hour is a guide. The pudding is ready when a knife inserted an inch from the centre comes out clean and the middle still trembles slightly. It firms as it cools.
- Bread crumbs meant something elseIn a book of this period "bread crumbs" for a soaked pudding most likely meant soft crumbs torn or rubbed from a stale household loaf rather than fine dry crumbs; the instruction to "soak bread in milk" points the same way. Two cups of soft crumbs is roughly three or four thick slices of day-old bread with crusts. Dry crumbs absorb more milk and give a pastier result.
- Butter and spiceMelt the butter and stir it in with the eggs, or dot it over the top before baking. Cinnamon and nutmeg are left unmeasured; about 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and a generous grating of nutmeg suits this quantity.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, flavoured with vanilla or brandy, served cold in a firm spoonful so it melts over the hot pudding. Roughly 1/2 cup butter to 1 cup sifted powdered sugar.
- YieldRoughly a scant quart and a half of custard; six to eight servings, comfortably held in a 2-quart dish.
Bread pudding is the standing answer to the standing problem of a household that baked or bought whole loaves: bread went stale faster than it was eaten, and milk and eggs were on hand. Versions of soaked bread baked or boiled with milk, eggs and spice run through English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and by the time Maria Willett Howard compiled Lowney's Cook Book for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in 1907, the recipe was so thoroughly assumed that it could be printed in three sentences with no oven temperature at all. Its place in a book built to sell cocoa is telling: one might read the plain puddings and custards as the base grammar, with the chocolate recipes as variations played over them.