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Chocolate Bread Pudding
3 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate melted 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt teaspoon vanilla 1 cup cold milk ½ cup sugar Mix all ingredients in the order given. Pour into a buttered baking dish, set into a pan of hot water, and bake one hour in a moderate oven; stir twice during the baking to keep chocolate from rising to the top.
A baked chocolate custard set in a water bath, from the era when Lowney's sold chocolate by the wrapped square. Two things need attention before you start: the missing bread, and the fact that the stirring instruction is not optional.
- The bread is missingThe title promises bread pudding but no bread appears in the ingredient list; either the bread was dropped in setting the type or the heading has strayed from its recipe. If you want to restore it, something like a cup to a cup and a half of soft stale bread crumbs, or two slices of buttered bread torn up, would suit this quantity of custard. Without it you have a chocolate custard, which is perfectly good but will set thinner.
- Squares of chocolateLowney's Premium was unsweetened baking chocolate. Squares of the period were generally an ounce apiece, so read three squares as about 3 oz unsweetened chocolate — not semisweet, which would make the half cup of sugar cloying.
- Cold milk, and whyThe milk goes in cold and unscalded, and with cold milk the melted chocolate tends to seize into fine flecks rather than form a smooth emulsion; whether that was the intention or simply the shortest route, the recipe does not say. If you would rather have a smooth pudding, temper the chocolate into warm milk first; the stirring instruction below then becomes less critical.
- A moderate oven350°F. The water bath keeps the custard below the temperature at which egg proteins curdle, so the dish should sit in hot water reaching at least halfway up its side.
- Stir twice — the hingeMelted chocolate is lighter than the milk-and-egg mixture and floats. Two stirs during the first half hour, before the eggs set, redistribute it. Once the custard begins to firm, stop stirring or you will break it.
- DonenessAn hour is a fair estimate for a shallow dish, but judge by the custard: set at the edge, a slight wobble at the centre, about 170–175°F on a thermometer. Carry-over heat finishes it.
- YieldOne cup of milk and two eggs makes roughly four modest servings. Serve warm or cold with cream; a hard sauce or a spoonful of whipped cream would not be out of place.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of several American chocolate makers — Baker's and Hershey's among them — that issued recipe collections in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to teach households what to do with a product still associated mainly with drinking chocolate. Bread pudding itself was the classic thrift dessert, a way of using stale bread, and chocolate versions appear as the cheap cocoa and baking chocolate of the industrial era brought the flavour within reach of ordinary kitchens. The water bath and the moderate oven belong to the same family of technique as baked custard and cup custard, which fill the surrounding pages of most books of this period; the instruction to stir twice is the sort of practical note that only comes from someone who has watched the chocolate float to the top and set there in a dark crust.