Home › Cake Mixtures and Puddings › Cake Mixtures and Puddings: Pudding
Cake Mixtures and Puddings: Pudding
1/8 t. salt. Rice Pudding. 2 C. boiled rice 1 egg C. sugar PUDDINGS. spk. salt 1 pt. scalded milk 2 C. raisins spk. nutmeg dish. 1. Pick over and wash raisins. 2. Beat egg, add sugar, salt and hot milk. 3. Stir in rice and raisins and turn into a buttered pudding 4. Set pudding dish in pan of water and bake in moderate oven until a knife thrust into center of pudding will come out clean.
Bread Pudding. 1 pt. scalded milk 1/4 C. sugar dish. 1 C. stale bread crumbs t. salt 1 egg 1 t. vanilla or lemon extract 1. Soak bread in milk until soft. 2. Beat egg and add sugar, salt and flavoring. 3." Add milk and crumbs and turn into buttered pudding 4. Bake same as rice pudding.
Note. Variations: (a) One-half cup raisins or currants may be added to plain bread pudding. (b) Chocolate bread pudding may be made by adding 3 T. cocoa to sugar.. (c) Yolks of two eggs may be used instead of one whole egg. A meringue, made by beating the whites of the eggs stiff and then adding 1 T. powdered sugar, may be spread over the pudding after it is baked. The pudding should then be set back into the oven to brown the meringue.
Two plain baked custards from a school cookery manual, both built on the same principle: egg and scalded milk set gently in a water bath. The technique matters more than the proportions here.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 325-350F. Custard puddings set best at the lower end; above 375F the egg curdles and the pudding weeps.
- The water bath is not optionalSetting the dish in a pan of hot water is what keeps the custard smooth. Fill the outer pan to roughly halfway up the pudding dish. Without it the edges will be grainy before the centre sets.
- DonenessThe knife test is sound, but pull the pudding when the blade comes out clean an inch or two from the centre and the middle still trembles. Carryover heat finishes it, and a fully firm centre in the oven means an overcooked one on the table.
- Scalded milkHeat to about 180F, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge. Scalding is often explained as a way to check souring organisms in unpasteurised milk; in a custard it also speeds the setting and dissolves the sugar. Add it to the beaten egg gradually, stirring, or the egg scrambles.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in this printing: the rice pudding's sugar, probably its raisins (2 cups against a pint of milk looks like a mangled fraction), and the bread pudding's salt. "spk." is a speck, meaning a pinch.
- Stale breadModern sandwich bread is softer and sweeter than the bread this manual assumed. Use a dry, plain white loaf, day-old and torn rather than blitzed, so the crumbs hold some texture after soaking.
- Cocoa variationThree tablespoons of cocoa whisked dry into the sugar prevents lumping. Early-1900s cocoa was largely natural rather than Dutched; either works, but Dutch-process gives a darker, milder result.
- MeringueTwo whites and a tablespoon of powdered sugar make a soft, quickly browned meringue rather than a stiff pie topping. Spread it to the edge of the dish so it seals, and return it to the oven only long enough to colour, watching it.
- YieldA pint of milk with a cup or two of rice or crumbs needs a 1- to 1½-quart dish and serves about four.
Rice and bread puddings earned their place in a students' household-arts manual because they teach one lesson cheaply: how egg thickens milk. Both are thrift dishes before they are desserts, built to use up cooked rice and dry bread, and they turn up widely in American domestic-science textbooks of the period alongside baked custard and cornstarch pudding. The water-bath instruction belongs to the standardised, measured style of the era, which insisted that a pudding was not a matter of judgement but of temperature and level measure. The variations at the end, raisins, cocoa, a meringue of the leftover whites, show the same pedagogy at work: one base formula, several outcomes, nothing wasted.