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Bread-And-Butter Pudding
855. Slice bread thin, spread it with butter, cut it in rather small pieces, and lay it in a dish with currants or any preserve between the layers. Pour over it a slightly-boiled custard made of milk, with one egg, a little sugar, and lemon-peel; let it soak two hours at least before it is to be baked, and lade the custard over to soak the bread. This is very good made without either currants or preserve. 856. An excellent Bread and Butter Pudding. Boil four laurel and two bay leaves in half a pint of milk, pour it over three and a half-ounces of bread grated fine, three ounces of loaf sugar and three ounces of butter, stir till well mixed; when cold, add two eggs and a glass of white wine, with a grate of nutmeg and a little lemon-peel; beat it before you put it in the oven, and bake half an hour.
Two puddings sit here under one heading: a plain soaked bread-and-butter pudding, and a richer grated-bread version flavoured with laurel leaves. The second cannot be made as written, and the reason is worth understanding.
- The laurel leaves"Laurel" in nineteenth-century English kitchens usually meant cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus), whose leaves were boiled in milk for a cheap almond flavour. Crushed or heated laurel leaves release hydrogen cyanide, and the dose from an infusion is unpredictable; cases of poisoning from laurel-flavoured preparations were reported during the period. There is no reliable safe steeping time or leaf count, so the second pudding should not be attempted.
- Bay is not the problemThe two bay leaves (Laurus nobilis) in the same pan are ordinary culinary bay and harmless. It is the four laurel leaves alongside them that put the recipe out of reach. If you want a bread pudding of that richer, grated-crumb type, use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- The first pudding is soundRecipe 855 is a straightforward soaked bread pudding and needs no rescuing. Thin-sliced buttered bread, dried currants or jam between the layers, and a thin custard poured over.
- The custard proportionOne egg is given with no volume of milk. For a dish holding six or eight slices of bread, reckon one egg to about half a pint of milk (an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz) with a tablespoon of sugar; the original assumes the cook knows how wet the bread should look.
- "Slightly-boiled custard"This is usually read as milk scalded with sugar and lemon peel, then poured onto the egg and stirred just until it thickens slightly off the heat. It should coat a spoon and no more; taken further it will curdle and the pudding sets grainy.
- Currants and lemon-peelCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Lemon-peel would most likely be pared zest steeped in the hot milk; the recipe does not say whether it was left in or lifted out.
- The soaking, and the ladlingThe two-hour soak is the hinge of the dish and is not optional padding. Ladle the custard back over the top slices two or three times as it sits, so the exposed bread softens and browns rather than drying to a crust.
- Oven and timeBake at 325-350F until the custard is just set and barely trembles at the centre, roughly 35-45 minutes depending on depth. A dish of this size serves four to six.