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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.
A hotel-scale bread and butter pudding: the quantities feed a dining room, and the ratio of custard to bread is the whole point. Whitehead gives no oven temperature and no sauce recipe, so both need supplying.
- Scale and yieldTwo pounds of bread, two quarts of milk and four whole eggs plus four extra yolks fills two large pudding dishes and serves roughly sixteen. Halving throughout works cleanly; a half batch fits one 9x13 dish.
- Oven temperatureUnstated, as was usual in trade books. Bake a custard pudding of this depth at 325-350F. A water bath is not traditional here but keeps the edges from curdling if your oven runs hot.
- Half an hour is optimisticThat timing suits shallow hotel pans. In a domestic dish two to three inches deep, expect 45-60 minutes. Judge by the custard, not the clock: it should be just set at the centre, around 170-175F, with a faint wobble.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. A pound is a generous pound; plumping them in hot water for ten minutes and draining stops them scorching on the exposed top layer.
- Half a nutmegThat is roughly a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half grated over two quarts of custard, spread across sixteen portions. Grate it fresh into the egg mixture rather than over the top, where it burns.
- The breadWhitehead wants the dark crust off and the slices buttered, not soaked. Day-old white bread, plain sandwich loaf or a soft-crumbed enriched bread, absorbs the custard without collapsing. Fresh bread turns to paste.
- Covering"Buttered paper or bread crusts" is a lid to stop the top setting before the middle does. Buttered parchment or loose foil for the first two-thirds of the bake, then uncovered to brown.
- The sauceNo brandy sauce is given on this page. A brandy sauce of this period would usually be either a creamed butter-and-sugar hard sauce beaten with brandy, or a thin cooked custard or cornstarch sauce flavoured with brandy off the heat so the alcohol is not driven off.
- "Baked late and served hot"The instruction that matters. This pudding is timed to come out of the oven near service; held warm on a steam table it goes dense and weeps whey.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men running American hotel kitchens in the 1880s and 90s, and the long digression here is characteristic of him: a recipe, then an argument with imaginary critics. The complaint he answers is a real one of the period, that American hotels leaned on baked puddings while British and German diners expected boiled and steamed ones, and his reply wanders through Walter Scott's heroines, Meg Merrilies from Guy Mannering, Flora Mac-Ivor from Waverley, Die Vernon from Rob Roy, Norna from The Pirate, before landing on the yacht in William Black's popular novel Madcap Violet (1876), where the heroine makes an apricot roly-poly. The point underneath the literary showing-off is a practical one about cost: boiled fruit rolls need neither milk nor eggs, and Whitehead notes that American kitchens used eggs more lavishly than any others, a habit that only worked while eggs stayed cheap. Bread and butter pudding itself is much older than either, a thrift dish for stale bread that appears in English cookery books from the early eighteenth century onward and survived into hotel service precisely because it turned a bakery's leftovers into a saleable dessert.