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Lemon Bread Pudding
891. Mix three ounces of bread grated, three ounces of loaf sugar, three ounces of butter, and the rind of a lemon grated; boil threequarters of a pint of milk, and pour over it; when cold, add three eggs well beaten, and the juice of one lemon; put paste round the dish, pour in the above ingredients, and bake.
A lemon custard thickened with breadcrumbs and baked in a pastry-lined dish — closer to a tart than to the sodden bread puddings of later cookery. The original assumes you know the oven and the pastry, so both need filling in.
- Let the milk cool firstThe instruction "when cold, add three eggs" is the hinge. Pouring scalded milk onto beaten egg will scramble it, so let the soaked crumb mixture go cold, as the recipe directs, before the eggs and the lemon juice go in.
- Three-quarters of a pintImperial measure: 15 fl oz, or a scant 2 cups. American pints will leave the custard slightly stiff.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold as a hard cone and broken or crushed for use. Granulated sugar, 3 oz or a scant half cup, is the direct equivalent.
- Bread gratedStale but not dried bread, grated on a box grater rather than blitzed to dust. Three ounces is roughly 1 1/2 loosely packed cups of fresh crumbs; measure by weight if you can, since crumb volume varies wildly.
- Paste round the dishIn period usage this may mean a pastry border round the rim as much as a full lining. If you line the dish, an 8-inch pie plate or shallow tart tin suits the quantity, and blind-baking the shell for about 10 minutes helps keep it from going soft under the custard.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the centre is set with only a faint wobble. Hotter than that and the custard weeps.
- Butter and lemon rindThree ounces of butter is generous by modern standards and gives a rich, almost curd-like set. Grate only the coloured zest of the lemon; the white pith turns the pudding bitter.
- YieldFour to six servings. Good warm, better at room temperature, when the lemon comes forward.
Bread puddings of this kind sit between household thrift and the confectioner's art: stale bread stands in for the ground almonds or flour that would otherwise body out a lemon custard, and the pastry lining turns it into something presentable at a dinner table. The lemon and butter proportions here are close to those of lemon cheesecake fillings of the period, which were also baked in a pastry case and contained no cheese. The recipe is printed numbered and unadorned, on the assumption that the reader already knew what "paste" meant and could judge the oven unaided.