Home › Puddings & Sauces › Bread Pudding
Bread Pudding
3 eggs. 1 quart milk. 1 heaping pint bread crumbs. 1 1/2 cups sugar or to taste. 1 tablespoon butter. A little lemon and nutmeg. Pinch salt. Soak crumbs until soft and measure, add yolks and beat until light, then add other ingredients. Bake until custard sets, then make meringue of whites, with a tablespoon sugar to each white. Bake to a light brown, spread with jelly and put meringue on top.
A plain baked custard pudding with a meringue lid. The original gives no oven temperature and no timing, both of which matter here.
- The hinge: bake the custard gentlyThree eggs to a quart of milk is a loose custard, and it will curdle if pushed. Bake at 325F in a pan of hot water and pull it when the centre still trembles slightly ot wry to bake it to a firm set.
- Oven temperaturesThe original gives no oven at all. A moderate oven of about 325-350F is a reasonable modern reading of "bake until custard sets"; figure 45 to 60 minutes for a 2-quart dish. The meringue then goes back in at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes to colour.
- Measuring the crumbsThe instruction is to soak the crumbs, then measure the heaping pint q that is soaked volume, not dry. Use soft crumbs from a day-old loaf; commercial dry breadcrumbs are far denser and will make it pasty.
- The sugarA cup and a half of sugar to a quart of milk is very sweet by current taste, and the jelly and meringue add more. A half to three-quarters of a cup is closer to modern palates; the recipe's own "or to taste" invites it.
- "A little lemon"Most likely grated rind or a few drops of extract rather than juice, since added acid does a custard no favours. About a teaspoon of zest and a quarter-teaspoon of grated nutmeg is a reasonable reading of "a little."
- Jelly before meringueSpread the jelly on the hot baked custard and pile the meringue straight onto it while both are warm. Meringue laid on a cold surface weeps and slides off in one sheet when cut.
- Meringue proportionA tablespoon of sugar per white is a soft French meringue beat to firm peaks and take it right to the edges of the dish so it seals against the rim.
- YieldServes six to eight from a 2-quart baking dish. Best warm or at room temperature the same day; meringue does not survive refrigeration well.
Bread pudding of this kind is the frugal end of the custard family: stale bread standing in for some of the eggs, sweetened milk doing the rest. Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote in the years around the First World War, a period often linked with American food-conservation campaigns, and her books lean hard on using up bread soaked crumbs, crusts, dried heels of loaves. The meringue-and-jelly finish is the period's standard way of dressing a plain pudding for company, the same trick applied to lemon pie and cottage pudding.