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Light-Boiled Pudding
895. Boil a pint of new milk with two bay and three laurel leaves; take out the leaves, and pour the milk, when cold, over five ounces of bread-crumbs, a quarter of a pound of loaf-sugar, and one ounce of butter; add three eggs well beaten and a glass of sherry; butter a mould, and stick it round with raisins or not. Boil one hour.
This is a standard Victorian boiled bread pudding, but the flavouring makes it unmakeable today. The recipe names bay and laurel as two different things, and the second one is the problem.
- The laurel leaves are the hinge, and they are toxicNineteenth-century British cookery books used "laurel" to mean cherry laurel, Prunus laurocerasus, an evergreen hedging shrub whose leaves were infused in milk or cream for a bitter-almond flavour. The leaves contain cyanogenic glycosides; when crushed or steeped they release hydrogen cyanide. Three leaves scalded in a pint of milk is an entirely unmeasured dose.
- Why the dose cannot be estimatedCyanide yield in cherry laurel varies with the age of the leaf, the season and how badly the leaf is bruised, and the compound is water-soluble and passes into the milk. There is no way to steep the leaves to a known strength in a domestic kitchen; boiling will drive off some part of what has dissolved, but how much is anyone's guess.
- Bay is not the same plantThe "two bay" leaves are sweet bay, Laurus nobilis, the ordinary culinary leaf and perfectly safe. Naming bay and laurel separately in the same line almost certainly means two different plants rather than one repeated, which is why this one should not be attempted. If you want a boiled bread-and-butter pudding of this type, work from a current recipe.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar came as a hard cone that was nipped and pounded before use. It is refined white sugar; a quarter pound is about half a cup by modern measure.
- New milk"New milk" means fresh whole milk straight from the dairy, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Whole milk is the nearest equivalent.
- The mould and the hour's boilMoulded puddings of this kind were generally covered with a floured cloth or greased paper and tied down before going into boiling water for the stated hour; the recipe itself says nothing beyond buttering the mould. Raisins pressed against the buttered walls become the decoration when the pudding is turned out.
Laurel water was one of the great convenience flavourings of the Georgian and early Victorian kitchen: cherry laurel grew in every shrubbery, and a few leaves steeped in milk gave the almond note that otherwise required expensive bitter almonds or ratafia. Its danger was not a secret even then. Laurel water featured in the notorious 1781 trial of John Donellan for the poisoning of his brother-in-law Sir Theodosius Boughton, and eighteenth-century experimenters had already shown the distilled water to be lethal to animals. Yet the leaves went on appearing in respectable cookery books for decades, sometimes with a warning to use few and not to let the milk stand on them, and almond essence seems to have displaced them only in the later nineteenth century. That a book of this period still prints the instruction without comment is a fair measure of how domestic and unremarkable the practice seemed.