Corrections
The bread custard receipt, and a few others like it near the beginning of this book should have been written, two slightly pressed quarts of bread crumbs, instead of pressed in or full-pressed. While a loose quart of bread crumbs has scarcly any weight it is found on the other hand that pastry cooks coming down on it with a pressure of fifty pounds to the square inch make much more of a cake and much less of a custard than the writer does of the same receipt. Also the few people who know how to cook rice dry, as it ought to be, will probably find the rice custard pudding requires in their hands about a pint more milk.
Use less baking-powder than is directed for Cottage Pudding. The amount there specified is enough for twice the quantity. See variations and adulterations of baking-powder in Book of Breads.
There has been a painstaking effort throughout this entire series to make each and every receipt so reliable that any person might choose among them with a reasonable certainty of success as complete on the first trial as at any subsequent time. "Home-Made" Pudding Sauce, or Sugar Dip. 1 cupful of brown sugar. 1 cupful of hot water. 1/2 cupful of butter. 1 tablespoonful of flour.
Mix flour and sugar together dry, pour the water to them, add the butter, and stir over the fire till it boils. The sauce should be thick.
An errata page that ends with a complete recipe. The corrections are worth reading even if you never make the sauce, since they show how much a vague measurement can swing a result.
- The crumb correction is the pointWeigh the crumbs rather than measure them by volume. Crumbs packed hard into a quart measure weigh considerably more than crumbs dropped in loosely, which is exactly the difference between custard and cake the author is complaining about.
- Baking powderThe Cottage Pudding amount should be halved. Period baking powders varied widely in strength and in filler, and many were tartrate-based and faster-acting than modern double-acting powder. For a plain cottage pudding, 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup of flour is the current standard.
- Dry-cooked riceRice cooked dry and separate absorbs far more liquid in a baked custard than rice boiled soft in water. The extra pint (2 cups) of milk is a real adjustment, not a hedge.
- The sauce: cupful and tablespoonfulThe cupful is most likely the half-pint, 8 fl oz cup; the recipe does not say whether the tablespoon is level or rounded. The 1/2 cupful of butter is 4 oz, one modern stick.
- Mixing flour with sugarThe dry flour-and-sugar blend is the whole technique. Sugar crystals separate the flour particles so the hot water can be poured in without lumping, no roux and no slurry needed.
- "Stir over the fire till it boils"Medium heat, stirring constantly, and let it come to an actual boil for a minute. One tablespoon of flour in a cup of water thickens only when the starch is fully gelatinised; pulled off early the sauce stays thin and tastes raw.
- Butter timingAdding the butter before boiling is fine here, but keep stirring as it comes up so the emulsion holds. If it separates on standing, whisk it back over low heat.
Errata pages like this one addressed a real problem: a single ambiguous word could ruin a batch. The author's irritation at "full-pressed" crumbs is a glimpse of the difficulty of volume measurement before kitchen scales were common in American baking: a quart of crumbs, of flour, or of brown sugar meant whatever the individual hand made it mean, and by the author's own account pastry cooks pressed harder than he did. The sauce appended at the end is the plainest sort of American pudding sauce, called sugar dip here, a brown-sugar-and-butter syrup lightly bound with flour and poured over cottage pudding, steamed puddings and bread puddings. Its virtue was cost: no eggs, no cream, no wine, just pantry staples cooked in one pan.