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Cracker Queen
Substitute one and one half cups cracker crumbs for bread crumbs in Bread Pudding, and add one cup seeded raisins cut in small pieces. Bake the same as Bread Pudding.
A variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Bread Pudding in front of you. A few notes on translating it.
- What the base recipe isPeriod American bread puddings vary, but many run in the region of a cup or so of crumbs, two cups of scalded milk, two eggs, a third to a half cup of sugar, a pinch of salt and a little vanilla or nutmeg. This page reproduces none of those quantities, and the 1 1/2 cups given here is the cracker measure, not necessarily the bread measure it replaces, so work from the Bread Pudding recipe in the same section rather than guessing.
- Which crackers"Cracker crumbs" in 1907 means plain soda or common crackers — unsweetened, lightly salted, closer to a saltine or an oyster cracker than to a graham. Graham or a sweet cracker will push the pudding sugary and sandy; if you use saltines, cut back the salt in the base.
- Soak before bakingCracker crumbs are drier and denser than bread and absorb slowly. Pour the scalded milk over them and let them stand 15 to 20 minutes before the eggs go in, or the finished pudding will have gritty pockets.
- OvenThe page gives no temperature; 'bake the same' simply refers you to the Bread Pudding directions. A moderate oven, around 350F, is the usual modern reading, and if the base recipe calls for a water bath, keep it: custard baked dry and hot curdles at the edges before the middle sets.
- DonenessRoughly 45 minutes to an hour for a 1 1/2-quart dish. It is done when a knife inserted an inch from the center comes out clean and the center reads 175-180F; it will still wobble slightly.
- The raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, not that seeds were added — muscat raisins of the period had pips. Modern seedless raisins need only the chopping. Plumping them briefly in hot water or milk keeps them from scorching at the surface.
- YieldServes six in a 1 1/2-quart dish. Serve warm, plain or with cream or a thin hard sauce.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company of Boston, is one of many turn-of-the-century cookbooks issued by a manufacturer, and like most of them it fills out its pages with a full domestic repertoire well beyond the sponsor's product. Cracker puddings belong to a thrifty New England habit of treating the common cracker as an interchangeable starch: barrels of hard soda crackers kept better than bread in a pantry, and their crumbs were used for pudding, stuffing, scalloped dishes and thickening alike. Why the variation is called 'Queen' the book does not say; the English queen of puddings is a crumb custard dressed with jam and meringue, but no connection between it and this title is documented. The recipe is written as a one-line amendment to the recipe above it.