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Bread Pudding (Three-day old bread Butter)
Three-day old bread Butter Sugar Cinnamon Molasses Allspice Chopped raisins Milk Pinch of salt Cut the bread very thin; butter it; put a layer in the pudding dish; add a little sugar, a pinch of allspice and cinnamon, a grating of nutmeg and a handful of chopped raisins. Add further layers until the dish is full, finishing with a layer of bread. Heat the milk; add a pinch of salt and enough molasses to color it perceptibly. Pour slowly over the mass, continuing until by gently pressing the bread the milk can be seen. Cover with a plate and leave in a moderately warm place over night. If it seems dry in the morning add more milk. Bake in a moderate oven three or four hours. Keep covered with the plate for two hours; then cover with paper.
A loose, proportionless recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew what a bread pudding should look like. The quantities are yours to set; what matters is the ratio of bread to milk and the long, slow bake.
- The hinge: soak until the milk showsThe only real measurement given is the test — press the bread gently and see milk rise. That is the point at which every slice is saturated but the dish is not swimming. Add milk in stages and stop there.
- Do the overnight soak in the refrigerator"A moderately warm place over night" means a warm kitchen holding milk for eight hours or more, which is where Bacillus cereus and Staphylococcus aureus thrive, and their toxins survive baking. Soak it cold instead and let the dish stand out only while the oven heats.
- Oven temperature"Moderate" in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere in the region of 350F, though usage varies from source to source; three to four hours at that heat suggests a range cooling through the afternoon rather than a steady modern oven. At 300-325F you get a similar slow set, and a pudding of ordinary depth will likely be done well before three hours — judge it by a knife near the centre coming out clean.
- Covered, then paperedThe plate is a lid that traps steam and keeps the top from drying while the interior sets. Swapping to paper for the last stretch lets the surface dry and colour without scorching — foil or parchment does the same job.
- Molasses instead of sugar"Enough to color it perceptibly" is roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons per quart of milk. Use unsulphured molasses; blackstrap is far more bitter than what this recipe intends and will dominate the spices.
- No eggsThis is a soaked-bread pudding, not a custard, so it will bake to something dense and sliceable rather than set and quivering. Adding two or three beaten eggs to the warm milk turns it into a custard pudding, which is a different dish.
- The breadThree-day-old bread means a dry, close-crumbed white loaf that drinks milk without collapsing. Fresh commercial sandwich bread turns to paste; dry it in a low oven first, or use stale challah, brioche or a plain country loaf.
- Working quantities and yieldFor a 2-quart dish, figure about 10-12 thin slices of bread, 3 to 4 tablespoons butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 3/4 cup raisins and roughly 1 quart of milk. It serves 6 to 8, warm, with cream or a hard sauce.
Bread puddings of this kind are thrift cookery first and dessert second: the household bought or baked whole loaves, the last of a loaf went hard within days, and the standing answer was to layer it with spice and sweetening and let milk soften it back into something edible. The molasses here is telling — added, the recipe says, "to color it perceptibly," in decades when molasses was the cheap sweetener in American kitchens. Mrs. Fryer's book, often attributed to Jane Eayre Fryer and generally dated to the late 1910s, is said to have been issued in a loose-leaf binder so a cook could add her own pages, and its recipes are written accordingly: an ingredient list with no amounts, a method that assumes judgement, and a doneness test based on what the cook can see rather than what a clock says. The three-to-four-hour bake is often explained by the rhythm of a coal or wood range that was hot in the morning and merely warm by afternoon, with the pudding parked in it to take advantage of heat already paid for.