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Duchess Pudding
cup cocoa ½ cup sugar 1 teaspoon lemon juice 2 egg whites 1 teaspoon salt Soak bread in scalded milk until soft. Add cocoanut, sugar, cocoa, lemon juice and salt; beat well; add yolks of eggs slightly beaten, and cut and fold in the wellbeaten whites. Turn into well-buttered pudding dish and bake in a moderate oven 30 minutes. Serve hot or cold. 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour cup milk cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt Baked Chocolate Soufflé 2 tablespoons hot water 3 squares Lowney's Premium
This page has come down to us damaged: the fraction marks have dropped out of the ingredient list, several ingredients named in the method never appear in the list at all, and the last few lines belong to the Baked Chocolate Soufflé that follows. Treat it as a template for a baked chocolate bread pudding rather than a set of working quantities.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for bread, scalded milk, cocoanut and egg yolks, none of which are listed. Nor can the leading "cup cocoa" be trusted; a full cup of cocoa against half a cup of sugar would be inedibly bitter, and the original almost certainly read a fraction of a cup. Do not guess your way through this one without a comparable modern bread-pudding formula beside you.
- The salt"1 teaspoon salt" is out of scale for a small dessert, and a fraction mark has probably dropped out here as elsewhere on the page; a quarter-teaspoon or less is the likelier reading.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. At that heat a shallow pudding dish of this size should be set in about 30 minutes, as written; a deeper dish will want longer, and the centre should be just firm rather than wobbling.
- CocoanutPeriod recipes usually mean unsweetened shredded or desiccated coconut, though sweetened prepared coconut was also sold. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will push an already sweet pudding further, so cut the sugar if that is what you have.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below the boil, when bubbles ring the edge of the pan. In 1907 this was partly a safety step with unpasteurised milk; today its purpose is simply to soften stale bread quickly and evenly.
- Folding the whitesThe whites go in last and uncooked into the batter, which is what lifts the pudding. Cut and fold rather than stir, and get it into the buttered dish and the oven at once.
- Lowney's PremiumThe trailing lines refer to Lowney's Premium Chocolate, an unsweetened baking chocolate. Any unsweetened baking chocolate stands in for it at one ounce per square.
- YieldWith the bread and milk quantities missing this can only be an estimate, but a pudding built on two eggs would likely serve four to six, depending on the depth of the dish.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like most house cookbooks of its era it exists to put the firm's product into as many dishes as it can plausibly reach — here, cocoa and "Lowney's Premium" squares named directly in the text. The pudding itself belongs to the long line of thrift desserts built on bread soaked in milk, dressed up with coconut and chocolate and lightened with beaten whites so as to arrive at the table looking like something more ambitious. The name is decorative rather than descriptive: "duchess" was attached freely to nineteenth-century dishes, from potatoes to pastries, to signal richness or a token of refinement, and carries no fixed meaning in the kitchen.