Home › Puddings and Pudding Sauces › Bread Pudding, Baked
Bread Pudding, Baked
One pint of stale bread; one quart of milk; three tablespoons of sugar; two eggs; one teaspoon of salt. Place the bread in the milk and after it has soaked two hours mash it very fine. Beat the eggs light and add to them the sugar and salt. When well mixed stir this into the bread and milk, pour the whole into an earthenware baking dish and bake three-quarters of an hour in a rather slow oven.
A plain custard-and-bread pudding of the most economical sort, written for cooks who measured bread by the cup and expected a sauce to be served over it. A few of its instructions need translating.
- "One pint of stale bread"Bread here is measured by volume, not weight: a pint of torn or cubed dry bread is roughly 2 to 3 oz, perhaps two or three slices of a firm white loaf, depending on how coarsely it is broken. Dry bread absorbs the milk more evenly than fresh.
- "A rather slow oven"Period terms are not precise, but a slow oven is usually taken as somewhere around 300F and a moderate one around 350F, which puts this in the region of 325F. Custards set gently; higher heat curdles the egg and weeps liquid into the dish.
- Time and donenessForty-five minutes is optimistic for a full quart of milk in a deep dish. Bake until the centre is just set and a thermometer reads 170-175F, which may take an hour or more depending on the depth of your dish.
- The dish itselfThe recipe names only an earthenware baking dish; something of about 2-quart capacity will hold this, and buttering it does no harm. Earthenware heats slowly and evenly, and a ceramic or glass baker does the same job. Setting it in a pan of hot water is a common way to guard against a grainy edge.
- A lean custardTwo eggs to a quart of milk is a thin ratio by modern standards, producing a soft, spoonable pudding rather than a sliceable one. Three or four eggs give a firmer set if that is what you want.
- SaltA full teaspoon is a good deal of salt for a quart of milk and only three tablespoons of sugar, and you may want to reduce it. As written this is a barely sweet pudding.
- What is missingNo vanilla, nutmeg, lemon peel or raisins. The pudding as written is very bare, and a sauce or a grating of nutmeg would not be out of place.
- YieldServes about six as written.
Baked bread pudding is household thrift made respectable: stale bread, which no careful kitchen threw away, revived with milk and egg into something that could be sent to the table. Versions appear in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward. Butterick, which published cook books as well as dress patterns, aimed such volumes at much the same readership: women running households on a budget and a schedule. The pudding is deliberately plain, and a sweet sauce is the obvious accompaniment.