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Indian Surprise
Four slices of bread buttered. Butter pudding dish and lay the bread in, then beat together, 1/3 cup sugar, 1 egg, 3 tbsp. molasses and 3 cups milk. Pour over buttered bread. Let stand about an hour. Bake in slow oven for about an hour or over. Serve with whipped cream.
— Mrs. Herbert Tarbell
A molasses bread pudding that borrows the flavor of Indian pudding without the cornmeal. The instructions are complete but assume a cook who already knows what a slow oven and a set custard look like.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300-325F. The custard is unthickened milk and a single egg, so gentle heat is what keeps it from curdling or weeping.
- Pan and quantityThree cups of milk plus four slices of bread fits a 1.5-quart baking dish. It serves four to six, depending on how generously the whipped cream is applied.
- The soak mattersThe hour of standing is not optional padding. Older bread absorbs slowly, and unsoaked bread floats up and bakes dry on top while the custard below stays loose.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses this book assumes.
- BreadThe recipe does not specify a type or thickness. Use a sturdy white bread, slightly stale, cut about three-quarters of an inch thick.
- Water bathNot called for, but setting the dish in a pan of hot water gives a smoother custard at this ratio of egg to milk. Without one, watch the edges.
- Doneness"An hour or over" is a range because ovens varied. It is done when a knife slipped into the center comes out clean and the surface has puffed slightly; the middle will still tremble a little and will firm as it cools.
- Egg countOne egg to three cups of milk is a very lean custard by current standards. Expect something closer to soaked bread in sweet milk than to a sliceable pudding.
The name points backward to Indian pudding, the New England molasses-and-cornmeal dish whose "Indian" is short for Indian meal, the colonial term for cornmeal. This version drops the meal entirely and uses buttered bread instead, keeping only the molasses and the long slow bake, which is presumably where the "surprise" comes in. Molasses is often said to have lingered as an everyday sweetener in much of the northern United States and Canada well after refined sugar became affordable, and bread puddings like this one were the standard use for a loaf gone past its best. The attribution to Mrs. Herbert Tarbell follows a familiar pattern in community cookbooks, which were compiled from members' contributions and printed the donor's married name alongside each recipe.