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Cocoa Pudding
Put half a pound of stale bread and one pint of milk in a saucepan, stirring it while it boils, until it becomes a thick paste; add a quarter of a pound of sugar, one ounce of butter, one tablespoonful of prepared cocoa, and a few drops of essence of vanilla. Remove the pudding from the fire, beat the yolks of three eggs, whip the whites of the eggs to a froth, then mix all into the other ingredients. Put it in a buttered pie-dish and bake for three-quarters of an hour.
A bread pudding built on a cooked panada rather than soaked cubes, which gives it a dense, almost custard-cake texture. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what a pudding batter should look like, so a few numbers are worth filling in.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was usual for the period. Three-quarters of an hour suggests something around a moderate oven, roughly 350F. A skewer in the centre should come out clean and the top should be set and lightly domed.
- Half a pound of stale breadThat is 8 oz, roughly a third of a standard sandwich loaf, crusts and all. Tear or crumb it before it goes in the pan; a dry, close-crumbed white bread absorbs the milk best, while modern soft supermarket bread will turn to paste almost instantly and may need a little less milk.
- Prepared cocoaIn this period the term generally covered cocoa sold ready for the cup, often blended with sugar and sometimes thickened with starch, rather than the unsweetened baking cocoa on shelves now. One tablespoon of modern natural or Dutch-process cocoa will read as more bitter and less sweet than intended; two to three tablespoons, with the sugar adjusted to taste, gives a flavour closer to what the name promises.
- Essence of vanillaRead as vanilla extract. Period essences varied in strength; a few drops up to a scant half-teaspoon of modern extract will suit.
- Cool before the eggs go inThe hinge of the dish. The paste comes off the fire boiling hot, and yolks stirred straight into it will scramble. Let it drop to warm, beat in the yolks, then fold in the whipped whites last and lightly, or the lift they provide is lost.
- Sugar and butterA quarter pound is a generous half cup of sugar; one ounce of butter is two tablespoons. Both go in while the paste is still hot so they dissolve and melt without extra stirring later.
- The dishA buttered pie-dish here means a shallow earthenware baking dish, not a pastry shell. Something around nine inches, or a 1.5-quart baking dish, holds the mixture with room for it to rise.
- Yield and servingSix modest servings. The recipe gives no serving instruction; it is good warm, and cream or a thin custard sauce would not be out of place. It firms considerably as it cools and slices cleanly the next day.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection runs to nearly a thousand pages and mixes Waldorf service dishes with the plain nursery and boarding-house cookery of the period, which is where this pudding belongs. Bread puddings of this kind — stale bread boiled into a panada, enriched with eggs and baked — were the standard way of using up a household's leftover loaf long before chocolate entered the formula. Cocoa arrived in such recipes only after the Dutch press process of 1828 and subsequent commercial cocoa powders made defatted, easily dissolved chocolate cheap and shelf-stable; American cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s are full of "prepared cocoa" called for by the spoonful. The recipe is a small record of the moment chocolate stopped being a luxury beverage and became a flavouring an ordinary kitchen kept on hand.