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Thorpe Pudding
907. Put a layer of preserves at the bottom of a pie-dish, and over it grated bread-crumbs three-quarters of an inch thick, pour over them a custard; bake in rather a cool oven twenty-five minutes. One quart of milk and four eggs makes custard enough for a good-sized pudding.
A plain Victorian baked custard set over jam and breadcrumbs, closer to a queen of puddings without the meringue. The whole thing hangs on gentle heat: the custard must set without boiling.
- "Rather a cool oven"Read this as 300-325F. Any hotter and the egg curdles into a weeping, grainy mass rather than setting smooth.
- Timing is optimisticA quart of milk with four eggs in a deep dish will need 45-60 minutes at that temperature, not 25. Judge by the centre: it should wobble as a single mass and a knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean.
- A water bath helpsIn a modern fan-free electric oven, stand the pie-dish in a roasting tin of hot water to keep the edges from setting hard before the middle moves.
- The custard is unsweetenedNo sugar is specified because the preserves at the bottom carry the sweetness. If your jam is tart, or you want a distinctly sweet custard, 2-3 tablespoons of sugar dissolved into the milk is in keeping.
- BreadcrumbsGrate stale, dry white bread, not fresh soft crumbs from a bag. Dry crumbs drink the custard and hold their shape; damp fresh crumbs collapse into paste. Three-quarters of an inch in an ordinary pie-dish works out to roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups.
- PreservesAny thick jam works; raspberry, damson and apricot are all plausible period choices. Spread it in an even layer and scatter the crumbs gently over it so the two do not marble together.
- Egg ratioFour eggs to a quart of milk (about 950 ml by American measure, about 1.14 litres imperial) is a soft, spoonable custard. Eggs of the period are generally said to have run smaller than today's large eggs, so if yours are large the set may be a little firmer than intended.
- YieldA "good-sized pudding" at this quantity serves six to eight. Serve warm rather than hot, in the dish.
Puddings named for a place or a house were common currency in nineteenth-century English cookery books, and Thorpe is a widespread village-name element across eastern and northern England, generally taken to be Scandinavian in origin in that region; the attribution tells you little more than that a recipe arrived in a compiler's hands with a name attached. What the recipe itself shows is how thoroughly bread governed the English sweet course. Grated crumbs were a common extender for milk and eggs, stretching a quart of custard into a dish that would feed a family, and they turn up in many variations: queen of puddings, cabinet pudding, brown betty, and the plain baked bread-and-butter pudding. The layer of jam at the bottom follows the same logic as in queen of puddings, where the preserve keeps a sweet, sharp seam beneath the bland set custard. Books of this period assumed the reader knew what a custard should look like coming out of the oven, which is why the timing here is given so briefly.