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Butter (Remove crusts from bread)
Remove crusts from bread and cut into five slices of uniform thickness. Spread generously with butter, arrange in baking-dish, pour over three cups of milk and molasses. Bake from two to three hours in a very slow oven, stirring three times during the first hour of baking, then add remaining milk. Serve with cream or vanilla ice cream.
A baked bread-and-molasses pudding of the plainest kind, and one where the original text has clearly lost part of its ingredient list. Read the whole thing before you start.
- The missing quantitiesThe instruction pours "three cups of milk and molasses" and later adds "remaining milk," but no total is given for either. A workable reading is to treat the three cups as the first addition and hold back roughly another cup for the end; the molasses amount has to be guessed at, and something in the region of half a cup suits five slices of bread.
- "Very slow oven"Around 250F, at the bottom of the old oven scale. At that temperature the two-to-three-hour bake is not an error: the starch swells slowly and the molasses darkens without scorching. A hotter modern oven will set the top well before the middle has cooked through.
- Why you stirThe stirring during the first hour is the hinge. Buttered bread floats; unless it is pushed back under the milk the three times the recipe calls for, the top slices toast dry while the bottom turns to paste. Stop after the first hour, as directed, so the surface can brown.
- The breadA close-grained white loaf a day or two old suits this best. Modern sandwich bread is softer and more open, so it collapses faster; use a firm white or a plain country loaf, and cut the slices at least half an inch thick.
- MolassesUse unsulphured baking molasses. Blackstrap is more bitter and more mineral than what the book intended, and at this long bake its edge concentrates rather than mellows.
- Butter, generouslyThe recipe's only fat is what you spread, so it does real work. Figure a tablespoon per slice, right to the edges.
- Dish and yieldA 1.5- to 2-quart baking dish holds this comfortably; leave an inch of headroom for the second addition of milk. Serves four to six as a plain pudding.
- ServingCream or vanilla ice cream is not a garnish here but the counterweight to a dark, faintly bitter pudding. Serve it warm rather than hot.
This is one of a family of thrift puddings that ran through nineteenth-century American cookery under names like Poor Man's Pudding and, in New England, molasses bread pudding — dishes built from stale bread, milk, and the cheapest sweetener in the pantry. Molasses was the everyday sugar of the region for generations, a by-product of the West Indies trade that arrived in barrels at Boston wharves and stayed on the table long after refined sugar became affordable, largely out of habit and taste. The final line, offering vanilla ice cream as an alternative to cream, is the one touch that feels later than the rest. The recipe's quantities, as they stand, are garbled.