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Butter (Eggs cup sugar teaspoon salt)
1 small baker's stale loaf. 3 eggs 1/2 cup sugar ¼ teaspoon salt 1 quart milk Remove end crusts from bread, cut loaf in one-half inch slices, spread each slice generously with butter; arrange in buttered pudding-dish, buttered side down. Beat eggs slightly, add sugar, salt, and milk; strain, and pour over bread; let stand thirty minutes. Bake one hour in slow oven, covering the first half-hour of baking. The top of pudding should be well browned. Serve with Hard or Creamy Sauce. Three-fourths cup raisins, parboiled in boiling water to cover and seeded, may be sprinkled between layers of bread.
A plain baked bread-and-butter custard from the Hot Puddings chapter, printed with a garbled ingredient line. A few of Farmer's assumptions need spelling out before it will work.
- The salt line is a typo"14 teaspoon salt" is a mangled 1/4 teaspoon. The full ingredient list is 3 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 quart milk.
- The bread is unmeasuredThe heading has lost the bread and butter quantities. The text says to trim the end crusts and "cut loaf in one-half inch slices," so the amount is left to the cook: enough slices, generously buttered, to line and part-fill the pudding-dish in layers.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a slow oven of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 275 to 325F. Hotter than that, and a quart of milk thickened with only three eggs risks curdling and weeping before the top colours.
- Why it is covered for the first half-hourThe lid traps steam so the custard sets gently and the exposed bread edges do not scorch while the centre is still liquid. Uncover for the second half-hour to get the browned top the recipe asks for.
- DonenessAn hour is a guide, not a rule. The custard is done when a knife slid into the centre comes out clean and the reading is 170 to 175F; carryover heat will finish it. Cooked past about 185F it turns grainy and leaks.
- The thirty-minute soak mattersButtered bread resists liquid. Without the standing time the slices float dry on top of a layer of plain custard instead of absorbing it.
- RaisinsFarmer parboils and seeds them because raisins of the period were commonly sold with the seeds still in, and needed softening as well as seeding. Modern seedless raisins need only a short soak in hot water to plump them, or none at all.
- The saucesHard sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar, flavoured with vanilla or brandy, served cold so it melts on the hot pudding; creamy sauce is the same base lightened with cream or a beaten egg white.
- YieldA quart of milk fills a 2-quart dish and serves six to eight.
Bread-and-butter pudding is the English answer to stale bread, recorded in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward and built on the older tradition of thickening sweetened custards with whatever bread was to hand. Its place in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book among the hot puddings is a straightforwardly economical one: Fannie Farmer's book was written for households that bought bread by the loaf and could not throw away the dry end of one, and the chapter is full of dishes — brown betty, cabinet pudding, bread pudding proper — that convert leftovers plus milk and eggs into a hot dessert. The slices are buttered and laid butter side down, a detail one might suppose keeps the fat working through the custard as it bakes rather than frying on the surface, though the recipe itself offers no explanation. The instruction to seed and parboil the raisins is a small piece of period evidence in itself, from an era before seedless varieties dominated the American dried-fruit trade.