Home › Puddings and Desserts › Bread-And-Butter Pudding
Bread-And-Butter Pudding
Bread and butter 3 eggs 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 quart milk 1 teaspoon flavoring Cut thin slices of bread; remove the crusts; butter both sides and line the bottom and sides of the pudding dish with them. Beat the eggs; add milk, sugar and flavoring; strain and pour over the bread. Sprinkle cinnamon or nutmeg over the top; let stand for twenty minutes; then bake in a slow oven. As soon as the custard begins to thicken on the sides of the dish it is done, and should be removed at once or it will whey. Serve with or without sauce.
A plain baked custard poured over buttered bread, from an era when "slow oven" and "until it thickens at the sides" were considered sufficient direction. The custard, not the bread, is the thing to watch.
- The hinge: do not overbakeMrs. Fryer's warning about whey is the whole recipe. Egg custard sets around 175-180F; past that the protein squeezes out water and the pudding turns grainy and weeping. Pull it when the edges are set and the center still wobbles as a single mass.
- Slow ovenIn period usage roughly 250-325F; the lower end of that range suits a custard, and 300F is safer if your oven runs hot. A water bath is not called for here but will make the set considerably more even if the dish is deep.
- Quantities and yieldThree eggs to a quart of milk is lean by modern custard standards; the bread absorbs and supports it. The recipe gives no dish size or yield: a quart of milk plus the bread will want a deep dish of roughly two to three quarts and serves six or so.
- Flavoring"1 teaspoon flavoring" is unspecified; vanilla extract is the likeliest reading, with lemon extract or grated rind as an alternative.
- The breadThe recipe asks only for thin slices with the crusts cut off. Soft modern sandwich bread collapses into paste; a plain firm white loaf, sliced thin and slightly stale, holds up better.
- Buttering both sidesUnusual now. The recipe gives no reason, but fat on both faces plausibly slows absorption, helping the slices lining the dish hold their shape rather than dissolving into the custard.
- The twenty-minute standNot optional. It lets the bread take up liquid evenly so the pudding bakes as one body instead of a wet layer under a dry one.
- StrainingStrain the egg-and-milk mixture as directed. It catches chalazae and any bits of set white, which otherwise show up as tough threads in the finished custard.
- SauceThe recipe leaves this open ("with or without sauce"); a hard sauce, a thin vanilla sauce or stewed fruit would all suit. The pudding is sweet enough on its own at half a cup of sugar to the quart.
Bread-and-butter pudding belongs to the long English tradition of using up stale bread, and versions appear in printed English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, generally as a thriftier cousin of the richer baked custards. Its presence in an American loose-leaf teaching cook book of the early twentieth century says something about how domestic science instruction worked: this is a lesson in baked custard as much as a dessert, teaching the ratio of eggs to milk, the meaning of a slow oven, and the visual cue for a set custard. Mrs. Fryer's insistence that the pudding will "whey" if left too long is exactly the kind of practical chemistry the cooking-school movement was built to transmit, at a time when few home kitchens had a reliable oven thermometer and none had a probe.