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Bread Pudding
3 eggs 2 cups bread-crumbs teaspoonful cinnamon cup raisins 2 tablespoonfuls butter 1 quart milk ½ teaspoonful salt Little nutmeg Scald milk. Add butter and bread-crumbs.
Beat eggs light and add with salt and spice to bread mixture. Bake lightly in moderate oven about an hour. To be served warm with hard sauce (page 158) or lemon sauce No. 2 (see below).
Lemon Sauce No. 2 1/2 pint sugar cup butter 1 egg Juice of half a lemon 3 tablespoonfuls boiling water Cream butter and sugar well, add egg, beaten very light, and lemon-juice. Beat all together thoroughly and add the boiling water, a tablespoonful at a time.
A plain custard-bound bread pudding of the thrifty sort, with an accompanying sauce that has not aged as well as the pudding. A few of the printed quantities have lost their fractions in transcription.
- Raw egg in the sauceLemon Sauce No. 2 is creamed butter and sugar with a whole raw egg beaten in; three tablespoons of boiling water added a spoonful at a time to a cold, fatty mass will not raise it anywhere near the 160F needed to make egg safe. Nor is it cooked afterwards — it is spooned onto warm pudding and eaten. Use a current cooked lemon sauce or a hard sauce made without egg.
- Missing fractionsThe transcription reads "cup raisins," "pint sugar" and "cup butter" where the original almost certainly printed fractions. For the pudding, half to one cup of raisins is the usual range; the sauce quantities are genuinely ambiguous and should not be guessed at.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is usually glossed as somewhere around 350-375F. An hour at the lower end of that range sets a quart of milk and three eggs to a soft custard; hotter and the egg tightens and weeps.
- Bread-crumbs, not crumbsIn older usage this most often meant crumbled or torn stale bread rather than the fine dry crumb of a modern canister, though the recipe itself does not specify. Fine crumbs will absorb the milk into a paste rather than leaving distinct, soaked pieces.
- Scalding the milkBring it just to the point where the surface shivers and a rim of bubbles forms, around 180F. The heat softens the bread quickly and melts the butter into the mixture; boiling it hard only makes a skin.
- Temper the eggsThe instruction to add beaten eggs to the hot bread mixture assumes you will pour slowly and stir. Let the milk cool a little, then add the eggs in a stream, or the whites will scramble in threads.
- The raisinsThey are listed but never mentioned again — fold them in with the eggs. Stirring them through the soaked bread rather than sprinkling on top keeps them from scorching.
- YieldA quart of milk and three eggs fills a two-quart dish and serves six to eight.
Bread pudding is among the most durable answers to the question of what to do with yesterday's loaf. When households baked or bought bread in quantity, staleness was a daily fact rather than an occasional annoyance, and a common remedy was to soak the bread back to softness in milk and bind it with egg. Cookbooks devoted to "left overs" are associated with a strain of early twentieth-century American domestic writing tied to the household economy movement, and such thrift was later reinforced by wartime food conservation campaigns, in which waste was framed as a moral failing as much as a financial one. The two sauces offered here mark the dish's double life -- hard sauce, a creamed butter-and-sugar paste generally traced to British puddings, turns a frugal dish into a company one, while the lemon sauce does the same work more cheaply.