Home › Puddings › Bread Pudding
Bread Pudding
2 cups stale but not dry bread 2 eggs
1 quart milk
½ cup sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
Soak the bread in the milk until it is very soft, then mash it fine. Heat together until nearly boiling. Beat the eggs until light and add to them the sugar, salt and vanilla. When well mixed, stir this into the bread and milk, pour the whole into an earthenware baking-dish, set in a pan of water, and bake three-fourths of an hour in a rather slow oven.
For chocolate bread pudding, melt two squares of chocolate over hot water and add this to the soaked bread and milk. For bread pudding with raisins, add one-half cup raisins.
A plain baked custard stretched with bread, from an era when a quart of milk and two eggs made supper for six. A few of its instructions need translating.
- "A rather slow oven"Read this as 300-325F. The water bath and the low heat are doing the same job: keeping the egg from curdling. At 350F or above the custard will weep and go grainy at the edges.
- The water bath is not optionalSet the filled dish in a larger pan and pour in boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Earthenware heats slowly and evenly; a glass or ceramic dish of similar thickness behaves the same way. A thin metal pan will overcook the outside.
- Bread quantityTwo cups means loosely packed torn or cubed bread, roughly 3 oz of a plain white loaf, day-old so it drinks the milk without dissolving to paste. Fresh bread turns gluey; dried-out bread never softens properly.
- A lean custardTwo eggs to a full quart of milk is a thin ratio by modern standards. The result sets soft and spoonable rather than sliceable. Expect that; it is not underbaked.
- Timing and donenessThree-quarters of an hour is optimistic for a quart of liquid at 300F. Start checking at 45 minutes but be prepared for 60-75. It is done when the center is just barely wobbly and a thermometer reads 170-175F; carryover heat finishes it.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two ounces here. Unsweetened chocolate against half a cup of sugar makes a distinctly bitter pudding by current taste; another 2-3 tablespoons of sugar brings it into line.
- Scalding the bread and milkHeating the mixture to "nearly boiling" before the eggs go in shortens the bake, but temper carefully. The recipe directs you to stir the egg mixture into the hot bread and milk; safer is to reverse it and add the hot bread and milk to the beaten eggs a little at a time, or you will have sweet scrambled egg.
- YieldServes six generously in a two-quart dish. Good warm; better cold the next day, when the custard has firmed.
Bread pudding is thrift cooking of a familiar kind, a way of turning the heel of a loaf into something worth putting on a table, and versions appear in English household books well before the nineteenth century. What marks this one as later, no earlier than the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, is the vanilla, the optional chocolate, and the assumption of a quart of fresh milk on hand. It reads as a recipe aimed at a woman running a house on a budget who wanted her economies to look deliberate. The two variations tacked on at the end are characteristic of the genre, a single base recipe branching into a week's worth of desserts without a second page of print.