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Bread Pudding with Cream Sauce
Pare off the crust of half a loaf of stale wheaten bread and cut it into slices a third of an inch thick, butter thoroughly with melted butter and line the dish with them. Put in a basin six ounces of currants, two eggs and a pint of cold milk, some powdered sugar, the grated rind of a lemon and its juice. Mix with a spatula for ten minutes and pour into a dish, which place in a moderate oven to cook for half an hour; then remove into another dish, and serve very hot.
A plain baked bread-and-egg pudding of the kind that filled out a hotel dessert list. The text is terse and assumes a cook who has made custard before; a few points need translating.
- The cream sauce is missingThe title promises one but the instructions never mention it. Presumably a sauce was to be taken from elsewhere in the book. Any thin vanilla custard sauce or sweetened cream will do.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as around 350F. At that heat a pint of milk with two eggs may well need closer to 40 to 45 minutes than the half hour stated. It is set when a knife an inch from the centre comes out clean, or the middle reads 170-175F.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups. Six ounces of currants is about a generous cup. "Some powdered sugar" is genuinely unspecified here; a third to a half cup suits the lemon.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh redcurrants. Plumping them in hot water or a little sherry for ten minutes keeps them from drawing moisture out of the custard.
- Ten minutes with a spatulaThis is not aeration but soaking time, letting the sugar dissolve and the eggs disperse. Whisking briefly and letting the mixture stand achieves the same thing.
- Lemon juice in milkThe acid may slightly thicken or fleck the cold milk. Add the juice last and pour over the bread straight away.
- Half a loaf, slicedPerhaps eight to twelve slices a third of an inch thick, depending on the loaf, stale enough to cut cleanly. Butter and line the dish, then pour the custard over so the bread soaks rather than floats.
- Water bathThe original bakes the dish directly. Setting it in a pan of hot water gives a smoother custard and no rubbery edge, which matters in a pudding this lean on eggs.
- "Remove into another dish"This most likely means the pudding was turned out of its baking dish onto a hot serving platter. It will only hold together if fully set and rested five minutes; serving from the baking dish is safer. Serves six.
Bread pudding earned its place in a Waldorf cookbook the same way it earned its place in every nineteenth-century household manual: it turned stale bread and a little milk into a dish that could be sent to the table. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, set grand hotel cookery alongside this kind of domestic staple, and the currants, lemon rind and butter-lined dish here mark the English nursery-and-boarding-house version rather than a French entremets. The lemon-and-currant combination is often said to be an English form of long standing, though how far back it can be traced is uncertain.