Home › Hot Puddings › Bread Pudding
Bread Pudding
2 cups stale bread crumbs 1 quart scalded milk 1/3 cup sugar 1/4 cup melted butter 2 eggs ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla or ¼ teaspoon spice Soak bread crumbs in milk, set aside until cool; add sugar, butter, eggs slightly beaten, salt, and flavoring; bake one hour in buttered pudding-dish in slow oven; serve with Vanilla Sauce. In preparing bread crumbs for puddings avoid using outside crusts. With a coarse grater there need be but little waste.
A plain custard-and-crumb pudding from Fannie Farmer's era, and one that stands or falls on gentle heat: it is a baked custard carrying bread, not a cake.
- Slow oven"Slow" is usually taken to mean somewhere around 300F, though the book gives no figures; the low heat is the point, since too hot an oven curdles the egg custard and makes it weep liquid around the edges.
- The hour is a guideA quart of milk in a deep dish may need 60 to 75 minutes. It is done when a knife inserted an inch from the centre comes out clean and the middle still trembles slightly.
- Water bath helpsSetting the pudding-dish in a pan of hot water is not in the text but was standard practice for baked custards of the period, and it protects the sides from setting hard before the centre cooks.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to just below simmering, until it steams and a skin begins to form. It softens the crumbs faster and shortens the baking; cool it before the eggs go in, as the recipe directs.
- The salt figureFor 2 cups of crumbs and a quart of milk, a sweet pudding wants about 1/4 teaspoon of salt. The 1½ teaspoons printed here is far more than the dish needs, and may well be a misprint.
- Spice"Spice" here means about 1/4 teaspoon of grated nutmeg, cinnamon or mace, used in place of the vanilla rather than alongside it.
- CrumbsUse soft crumbs from the interior of a day-old white loaf, grated coarse, not dry packaged breadcrumbs, which absorb far more milk and give a pasty result.
- YieldServes six in a dish of about 1 1/2 to 2 quarts. Vanilla Sauce appears elsewhere in the book; cream or a spoonful of jam does as well.
Bread pudding is a household thrift dish, a way of turning stale loaf ends and a surplus of milk into a dinner sweet, and it survived into printed cookery long after the need for it eased. Its place in a late nineteenth-century cooking-school book is telling: such manuals were written for students learning proportions, and this is essentially a lesson in baked custard, with bread standing in for some of the thickening the eggs would otherwise do. The closing note about avoiding outside crusts and grating coarse to reduce waste is the schoolroom voice as much as the housekeeper's, and it reflects a kitchen where a loaf was bought or baked whole and every part of it accounted for.