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Baked Bread Pudding
Place in a sauce a half pint of sweet cream, a little powdered sugar and lemon peel, place on stove and stir with a spatula for three minutes or so, then remove from the fire. Pare off the crust from some stale bread, and cut it into some small dice-shaped pieces, mixing them lightly into the above mixture, and place on the lid of the pan. Let the bread soak for ten minutes. Chop up very fine an ounce or so of candied citron, mixing with it four ounces of dried currants, some melted butter, and melted and strained beef-marrow, stirring in a little salt. Pour this preparation in with the soaked bread and mix it together gently for about ten minutes, breaking into it three eggs, one at a time, and add a gill of Madeira wine and half a gill of cognac. Butter and sprinkle with breadcrumbs a pudding-mould, and pour into it this preparation, lay on a baking-plate, and put in a slow oven to bake for an hour and a half. Remove and turn it onto a hot dish, serve with Sabayon sauce with Madeira.
An old-style rich pudding written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen, where quantities of bread and the size of the mould were assumed knowledge. A few conversions and one point about temperature make it workable.
- "Place in a sauce"Read this as a saucepan — the compositor dropped the word. Nothing is baked in a casserole dish here until the final mould.
- Liquid measuresA half pint of cream is 1 cup. A gill is 4 fl oz (half a cup) of Madeira; half a gill is 2 fl oz of cognac. That is a substantial amount of alcohol for three eggs, so the pudding sets soft.
- How much breadThe original never says. Judge by feel: the cubes should be saturated but still distinct, not a paste. Roughly half a pound of crustless stale bread suits this quantity of cream, wine and spirit.
- Slow ovenTake this as roughly 300–325F; the original gives no temperature. This is a custard bound by only three eggs and thinned with 6 fl oz of alcohol, so a hotter oven risks curdling it before the centre sets. Ninety minutes at that heat suits a mould of about a quart and a half, though the recipe specifies no size.
- Cool before the eggsThe cream mixture and the melted butter and marrow must be no more than warm when the eggs go in one at a time, or they will scramble in the bowl.
- Beef marrowRendered marrow from split beef bones, warmed until liquid and strained of solids. Ask a butcher for marrow bones; a couple of large ones give an ounce or two. Extra melted butter substitutes acceptably, though it loses the particular silkiness marrow gives.
- Candied citronThe candied peel of the citron fruit, still sold at holiday baking counters and by mail. Candied lemon peel is the closest stand-in. Dried currants are the small black Zante kind, not raisins.
- Turning it outButter and crumb the mould thoroughly and let the baked pudding stand five minutes before inverting, or the soft centre will tear. Serves six to eight.
- The sauceSabayon here is zabaglione made with Madeira — yolks, sugar and wine whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foaming. Whisk constantly and take it to 160F for the eggs' sake; it will hold only a few minutes before it separates, so make it last.
Marrow puddings run through English and French cookery from the seventeenth century onward, when beef marrow was a prized enriching fat used much as we now use butter or cream, and bread is often said to have served as the standard binder before flour-and-butter cake batters took over the sweet course. What this recipe sets down is that older tradition dressed up: the thrifty domestic bread pudding rebuilt with candied citron, currants, Madeira, cognac and a whipped wine sauce, so that nothing about it reads as leftovers. Madeira's prominence is itself dated — its hold on American cooking and drinking was strongest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and had faded well before 1900, and it appears in kitchen books both in the pudding and in the sauce poured over it.