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Baked Brown Bread Pudding
POUDING A LA GOTHA. 2 full pressed quarts of graham bread crumbs. 2 quarts of water or milk (8 cups). 4 ounces of molasses (2 cooking spoons). 4 ounces of butter. 8 yolks of eggs. 1 teaspoonful of ground cinnamon.
Have the bread finely crumbled; melt the butter and mix it with the milk, eggs and molasses; stir all together and bake half an hour. The natural lightness of the bread counts for quality in all these puddings, and it should not be destroyed by either scalding or heating. Serve the preceding with honey and butter diluted and made hot, or else with any good pudding sauce.
Souffle puddings, it has been remarked, are not adapted for hotel dinners long drawn out, but they are very handsomely replaced by meringues, which,--but stay; the Boston publisher's pudding must not be forgotten. Blessed is the hotel guest whom the waiters delight to honor. The publisher was one of these--sojourning in a beautiful winter city--but whether it was a real Spartan like abstemiousness of habit or whether there could be nothing good outside of Boston, all their efforts were thrown away until "Ha! now you are bringing me something I like."
Boston Bread Pudding,
A hotel-scale baked pudding written for a pastry department, not a household. Read the quantities as a template and scale down before you start.
- Yield and scalingTwo quarts of crumbs plus two quarts of liquid fills a large hotel pan and would serve roughly sixteen to twenty. Quartering the recipe — 2 cups crumbs, 2 cups milk, 2 egg yolks, 2 tablespoons molasses, 2 tablespoons butter — fits a standard 8-inch square dish.
- Graham breadGraham bread is coarse whole-wheat, made from unsifted flour and usually a little sweet. Any dense whole-wheat loaf stands in; avoid packaged graham crackers, which are a different product entirely.
- "Full pressed quarts"The crumbs are measured packed down, so a quart here is considerably more bread than a loosely heaped quart. Weigh if you can, bearing in mind that the weight of a pressed quart varies a good deal with how soft or dry the loaf is.
- Cooking spoonThe book's "cooking spoon" is a serving-size kitchen spoon: the recipe equates two of them with 4 ounces of molasses, so roughly 2 ounces apiece, though it is not clear whether that is weight or fluid measure. Either way it is not a tablespoon.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 350F; a custard-bound pudding this wet needs a moderate oven so the yolks set before the surface hardens.
- Half an hour is for a thin panThirty minutes presumably assumes the mixture spread shallow in a large pan; the recipe does not say. In a deep dish, expect 45 to 60 minutes, and judge by the centre — set with a slight wobble, about 175F internally. Past that the yolks curdle and weep.
- The hinge: do not compact the crumbsThe author insists the bread's natural lightness counts for quality and must not be destroyed by scalding or heating. Crumble it dry and fold the liquid in gently rather than scalding the milk over the bread or mashing it to paste.
- Yolks onlyEight yolks give richness without the lift or the rubberiness whites contribute. Keep the whites for the meringues the author mentions in the same breath.
- The sauceHoney thinned with a little water and whisked with butter, served hot, is essentially a warm honey butter — make it just before serving, as it separates on standing.
Graham and brown-bread puddings were the thrifty end of nineteenth-century American baking, a way to use the stale ends of a coarse loaf, and they carried a whiff of the health-reform movement that gave graham flour its name after Sylvester Graham's campaign for unsifted whole-meal bread. Naming it pouding a la Gotha is pure hotel practice: American pastry cooks worked from French menu vocabulary and attached grand-sounding continental names to homely dishes. The digression about the Boston publisher tells you as much about the trade as the recipe does, full of the kitchen gossip and guest-pleasing lore of the big American hotels, where a pudding's real virtue was that it held up through a long table d'hote service in a way a souffle never could.