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Buttered Bread Pudding
Butter twelve slices of bread; arrange in baking dish. Cover with four cups milk, four slightly beaten eggs, three fourths cup sugar, one half teaspoon salt, and the grated rind and juice of one lemon. Bake one and one half hours in slow oven. Serve with hard sauce.
A plain baked custard poured over buttered bread, from an era when a slow oven meant a coal range banked down for the afternoon. Two things decide whether it succeeds: the oven temperature and the lemon.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300-325F. At that heat the egg mixture sets without weeping, and the long hour and a half is genuinely needed.
- The lemon is the hingeThe lemon -- Lemon juice can curdle a milk custard, though the quantity here is small and the original adds rind and juice straight in. Nothing in this recipe is cooked on the stove, so if you are cautious, stir the rind into the milk and eggs and add the juice last, just before pouring, or leave it out and put the juice in the hard sauce instead.
- BreadTwelve slices would most likely have come from a firmer, closer-grained white loaf than a modern soft sandwich bread. Day-old bread absorbs custard without collapsing; fresh supermarket sandwich bread turns to paste. Crusts left on give the top something to crisp against.
- Water bathNot mentioned in the original. In an electric or gas oven, set the dish in a roasting pan with an inch of hot water for insurance against a grainy edge.
- DonenessThe centre should be just barely trembling and a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean; about 170-175F on a thermometer. Carryover heat finishes the middle as it stands.
- Hard sauceA creamed mixture of butter and powdered sugar, usually about half a cup of butter to a cup and a half of sugar, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or here lemon. Chill it firm; it is meant to melt over the hot pudding.
- Dish and yieldA 2- to 2 1/2-quart baking dish holds this comfortably; four cups of milk plus bread needs the room. Serves eight.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of many cookbooks issued by food firms to put their product in home kitchens, though the collection ranges far beyond chocolate into ordinary New England household cookery. Bread pudding belongs to that ordinary end: a thrift dish, the standard use for a loaf gone dry, and old enough that recipes for bread and butter puddings appear in English cookbooks well before 1800. The buttered-slice version distinguishes itself from the sort made with torn crumbs by keeping the bread in layers, so the top browns while the lower slices soak into custard. The lemon and the hard sauce mark it as a company dessert rather than nursery food, and hard sauce itself — butter beaten with sugar and often spirits — was by this period the near-automatic accompaniment to any steamed or baked pudding on an American table.