Home › Puddings & Sauces › Chocolate Pudding
Chocolate Pudding
1 qt. milk. 5 eggs. 10 tablespoons bread crumbs. 1 tablespoon grated chocolate. 1 cup sugar. 1 tablespoon butter.
Scald milk, add bread crumbs and sugar; cook five minutes. Take from fire and pour over the grated chocolate. Stir until dissolved. It will take about ten minutes. Add vanilla to taste. Add butter, then the well-beaten eggs; bake until firm in a pan of water. When done, cool and chill. Serve with whipped cream.
A baked chocolate bread custard, closer to a pot de crème thickened with crumbs than to the steamed puddings of the same era. The water bath is not optional.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Bake a custard of this kind at 325F, in a roasting pan with hot water reaching halfway up the dish. Expect 45 to 60 minutes for a single 2-quart dish, less for individual cups.
- Test for doneness"Bake until firm" means the edges are set and the center still trembles slightly when the pan is nudged. Carried past that point the eggs curdle and the custard weeps liquid on chilling.
- Grated chocolateThis would have been block chocolate grated on a hand grater; the recipe does not say whether sweetened or unsweetened. One tablespoon is very little — roughly a quarter ounce — and gives a pale, faintly chocolate custard. Half an ounce to an ounce of chopped unsweetened or bittersweet chocolate is closer to what a modern reader expects.
- Temper the eggsThe chocolate milk must be cooled to warm before the beaten eggs go in, or they will scramble. Whisk a little of the warm mixture into the eggs first, then return it all to the pan.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from a day-old white loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and turn the pudding pasty. Ten tablespoons is a generous half cup plus two tablespoons.
- Vanilla"To taste" here is about a teaspoon of extract for a quart of milk.
- YieldA quart of milk and five eggs serves eight, or six generously.
- ChillingThe instruction to cool and chill matters — warm, this reads as loose and eggy; cold, it slices.
Mrs. Wilson's book, generally dated to just after the First World War, belongs to the era of federal food-conservation campaigns in which she is often said to have been a prominent voice, and this pudding shows the habit: a quart of milk and ten tablespoons of bread crumbs stretch five eggs and a spoonful of chocolate into dessert for eight. Bread-crumb custards were the thrifty English nursery pudding tradition — carried into American cookbooks and dressed up here with chocolate.