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Twenty Minute Pudding
Butter a dish; cut thin slices of bread and butter, and put layer in dish; then layer of jam and so on until dish is almost full. Beat 2 eggs with milk, 1/2 cup sugar, and a little nutmeg and salt. Pour over all. 1 cup sugar 2 tbsp. molasses 3/4 cup butter 2 cups raisins 1 cup currants 1/2 cup citron Steam 3 hours.
— Mrs. James Tattersall
A bread-and-butter pudding with jam between the layers, of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how custards behave. The original leaves the milk quantity and the baking directions to be supplied from experience.
- The custard ratioTwo eggs will set roughly 1 1/2 cups of milk into a soft custard; the original does not state the quantity, so measure enough to come nearly level with the top layer of bread. Too much milk and the pudding weeps, too little and it bakes dry.
- OvenCooking -- The page gives no oven or timing for the bread-and-butter layers; the only cooking direction printed on it is "Steam 3 hours," which belongs with the fruit-and-molasses ingredient list that follows and appears to be a second recipe run into this one. Bake or steam until the centre is just set and no longer liquid when the dish is tilted.
- Twenty minutes means assemblyTwenty minutes -- The name cannot refer to the cooking, which is much longer; what the twenty minutes was meant to count is not stated on the page.
- Let the bread soakStand the assembled dish 15 to 20 minutes before it goes in the oven. Bread that has drunk the custard bakes into one mass; dry bread floats and browns to leather on top.
- BreadUse a plain white loaf a day or two old, cut thin and buttered on one side only. Soft fresh sandwich bread collapses to paste.
- JamA firm preserve such as raspberry or plum holds its layers. Loose jelly dissolves into the custard and turns the whole pudding pink and oversweet.
- SugarHalf a cup of sugar in the custard is generous alongside the jam. A quarter cup is plenty for most modern palates.
- YieldMade in a 1 1/2-quart dish, it serves six. Best warm rather than hot, with cream.
Bread and butter pudding is the standard English answer to a stale loaf, in print since the eighteenth century and carried into North American community cookbooks as a reliable filler for a large table. The jam layers are a later domestic refinement, arriving with cheap sugar and home preserving in the Victorian period, when almost every household had a shelf of jars to use up. Recipes credited to a named contributor -- here Mrs. James Tattersall -- are a common feature of books of this sort, which are generally said to have gathered a community's everyday cooking rather than showpieces.