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Madeira Wine Sauce
2 pressed in quarts of white bread crumbs. 2 quarts of milk. 4 ounces of butter melted. 4 ounces of white sugar. 1 lemon. 8 yolks of eggs. Crumble the bread fine, either by grating or chop ping. Grate the rind of the lemon into it and squeeze the juice into the sugar. Beat the yolks of eggs and add them and the sugar to the milk, then the melted butter, and pour over the bread crumbs. Stir up well, turn it into two buttered milk pans and bake about half an hour. Buttering the pans allows of the brown outside being taken out clean instead of sticking to the pans and going to waste. In this cheap, simple and excellent pudding, as in many others, the whites of the eggs would do no good; the pudding is richer without them. They can be used for other purposes The reader is advised to note the preceding receipt for bread custard, as several acceptable varieties are made by certain additions, as BAKED CITRON PUDDING, CREAM SAUCE. BAKED RAISIN PUDDING, PT. WINE SAUCE. BAKED
The heading is a printer's slip: what follows is the book's baked bread custard pudding, with the wine and cream sauces listed only as suggested variations at the end. Treat it as a large-batch custard pudding and everything falls into place.
- Quantities are commercial scaleQuantities are large -- Two quarts of milk, eight yolks and two quarts of crumbs fill two wide shallow pans; on the usual reckoning that would feed something like twelve to sixteen. Halving should work, given a correspondingly smaller pan.
- "2 pressed in quarts" of crumbsThis means crumbs packed down into a quart measure, twice over — about 1 to 1 1/4 lb of soft crumb from a stale white loaf. Dry commercial breadcrumbs are not a substitute; they are far denser and will drink the custard into paste.
- Milk pansA milk pan was a wide, shallow dairy pan, usually tin or earthenware. Any shallow baking dish of 2 to 3 quarts capacity does the same job, and the shallowness is the point: it sets quickly and gives the browned top and edges the author wants to lift out whole.
- Oven heat, which the original omitsBake at 325 to 350F. Higher and the yolk custard curdles and weeps around the bread before the centre sets.
- Judge by set, not by the clockHalf an hour is plausible for a shallow pan but not a rule. It is done when the centre is just firm and a knife comes out clean — around 170 to 175F internally. Carryover heat finishes it, so pull it slightly before it looks fully set.
- Sugar and butterFour ounces of sugar is about half a cup, and four ounces of butter is one stick. The juice goes into the sugar and the grated rind into the crumbs, as directed.
- Yolks only, deliberatelyThe author's note is sound: whites make a baked custard firmer and more apt to turn watery, while yolks give body and richness. Do not be tempted to add them for economy.
- The variationsCitron pudding means chopped candied citron stirred through; raisin pudding, raisins. The sauces named in the list are a cream sauce and a port wine sauce (Madeira appears only in the stray heading); such sauces were served warm and poured over at table rather than baked in.
Baked bread custard belongs to the long line of thrift puddings that turned stale loaf into a dessert. The quart quantities here, and the aside about buttering the pans so the browned crust can be lifted out "instead of sticking to the pans and going to waste", both point to cooking on a fairly large scale. Fortified wines such as port and Madeira were among the common bases for sweet pudding sauces of the period.