Home › Hot Desserts › Bread Pudding
Bread Pudding
1 pound of pieces of stale bread 1 pint of boiling milk Little nutmeg 2 ounces of butter 1 1/2 ounces moist sugar 4 ounces of sultanas Pour the milk on the bread, let it stand for a few minutes, then mash it up. Mix the sugar and butter together, and add to the bread and milk; mix well, and put in a buttered dish, and bake one and one-half hours in a moderate oven.
A plain, eggless bread pudding of the thrifty English sort — dense and sliceable rather than custardy. A few of the quantities and terms need translating before you start.
- The bread-to-milk ratioA pound of bread to a pint of milk gives a stiff, cakelike mixture, not a soft custard. If the book is British, that pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml); an American pint of 16 fl oz will leave it drier still. Add milk a little at a time until the mash holds together but is not soupy.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 350F/175C, though the book gives no figure. At roughly that heat, ninety minutes suits a deep dish of this density; the top should be firm and browned.
- Moist sugarSoft brown sugar, sold in Britain as light or dark muscovado or simply soft brown. Granulated white will work but loses the faint treacle note the original assumes.
- SultanasGolden raisins in American shops. The recipe never says when to add them — fold them in with the butter and sugar so they are distributed rather than sitting on top, where they scorch.
- Butter and sugarTwo ounces of butter is about half a stick, 55 g; an ounce and a half of sugar is roughly three tablespoons. Cream them together as directed, then work them into the hot bread mash while it is still warm so the butter melts through.
- No eggsThis pudding sets on starch and bread crumb alone, which is why it holds its shape when cold and slices like a cake. Do not treat it as a bread-and-butter pudding; it will not be silky and is not meant to be.
- Cover, then uncoverNinety minutes uncovered may dry the surface hard. You can foil for the first hour and leave it bare for the last half hour to brown the top, though the recipe says nothing about covering.
- YieldA pound of bread makes a substantial pudding; six to eight portions. Serve hot with custard or cream, or cold in squares.
Bread pudding of this kind is the least glamorous and most useful thing in the English repertoire: a way of turning the heel of the loaf into a dessert when bread was expensive and throwing it out was unthinkable. The absence of eggs looks deliberate rather than accidental, though the distinction is often overstated: eggless milk-and-bread versions sat alongside egged ones in period cookbooks, and eggs and cream are more often associated with the richer bread-and-butter pudding. Sultanas, seedless and imported dried from the eastern Mediterranean, were by this period a common cheap baking fruit in British kitchens, though currants and raisins remained in wide use.