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With Brandy Sauce

2 pounds of bread in slices. 1/2 pound of butter--best fresh. 2 quarts of milk. 1/4 pound of sugar. 4 whole eggs and 4 yolks. 1 pound of clean picked currants. 1/2 a nutmeg, grated.

Have the slices free from dark crust. Spread them with the butter and place in two layers in two pudding pans, with the currants sprinkled between and on top. Beat and mix the eggs, sugar, milk and nutmeg together, pour over the bread, cover the puddings with either buttered paper or bread crusts, and bake about half an hour. To be good, this pudding must have plenty of custard in proportion to the bread, and be baked late and served hot. Lemon transparent sauce answers as well as brandy. "They say" that we in hotels run too much to baked puddings and not enough to boiled and steamed. It need not be so. They, the complainants, are probably English, Germans and Scotch, who all are accustomed to puddings boiled rather than baked. The last boiled pudding we had was Scottish. Where else in old Scotland did we see a nice person making a boiled pudding, a favorite cosmopolitan sort not National in character? Of course it was not Meg Merrilies stirring the witch-pot which so terrified Dominie Sampson, hungry as he was; nor Flora Mac Ivor; nor Die Vernon; nor George Sands's French imitation of her, yet it was some one with a family resemblance to them, only there was the dash of sea waves somewhere about. Mirando keeping house for Prospero in the island cavern in the Tempest? No. Two young people cooking wild ducks on an island in Foul Play? No; milder; further north, among cliffs and wild fowl. Norna, of the Fitful Head? No; but near by in Scottish waters. It was Madcap Violet on board a yacht making an apricot jam pudding, a real roly-poly pudding for the captain, and all hands if there were any besides. Apricot jam pudding is real good. Green apple rolls are rather more popular on this side. Does Mr. William Black really wish it to be understood that over there the wealthy railroad builders' daughters all know how to make puddings? This one, it seems, made her jam pudding with a heart ache; a very poor mixture; too heavy; baking powder is incomparably better, as you shall see. Boiled fruit rolls have the great recommendation of not requiring either milk or eggs in their composition. Nowhere are eggs so lavishly used as in our American hotel kitchens. They are usually cheap enough, and if not it is best that articles requiring eggs should have enough to make them what they ought to be, but the need is, for times of scarcity, to cultivate a knowledge of articles of a plainer sort. These roll puddings and other plain combinations of flour and fruit are used everywhere in England. The Frenchman serves them at the best tables as le pouding roule, or as pouding al' Allemande, or, al' Anglaise, when made with preserves or jam.

Not many can, and perhaps not many try, to make the paste for boiled rolls as good as it is capable of being; but when good it can safely be said that none of our richest puddings are more in request than these following.