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Vanilla
1 pint milk. 4 tablespoonfuls grated chocolate. 2 tablespoonfuls but-. 1/3 cup sugar. Whites 2 eggs. Yolks 2 eggs. 1 1/2 cups stale breadcrumbs (soaked. in 2/3 cup water). 2 tablespoonfuls pow-. Scald milk, add chocolate melted over hot water, butter, and sugar. Stir well and pour over the soft bread-crumbs and beaten yolks of eggs. Add one teaspoonful vanilla, pour into buttered pudding-dish, and bake half an hour. Make meringue of whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry, the powdered sugar, and half a teaspoonful vanilla.
It may be served warm or cold.
A chocolate bread-and-custard pudding under a meringue, written in the shorthand of a book that assumed you had already read the ingredient list. That list has not come down with the text, so the proportions below are the standard ones for a baked bread custard rather than the author's own.
- The missing quantitiesNo amounts survive in this passage. A workable baked bread custard runs about 2 cups scalded milk, 2 oz chocolate, 1 tablespoon butter, 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, 2 cups soft crumbs and 3 egg yolks; the meringue takes the 3 whites with about 3 tablespoons powdered sugar. Treat these as a reconstruction, not the original recipe.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. A baked custard of this kind belongs at 325-350F, set in the oven until the centre is just barely trembling. Half an hour is right for a shallow dish; a deep one will want closer to 45 minutes.
- The chocolateIn a book of this period "chocolate" means unsweetened baking chocolate in cakes, not chips or couverture. Use unsweetened bar chocolate, melted over hot water as directed, or the sugar balance will collapse.
- Scalding the milkHeat only to the point where the surface shivers and a ring of bubbles forms at the edge, around 180F. Boiled milk gives the pudding a cooked, slightly sulphurous flavour that the chocolate will not hide.
- Soft bread-crumbsThese are torn or rubbed crumbs from the inside of a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Dried crumbs absorb far more liquid and turn the pudding pasty.
- Tempering the yolksThe instruction to pour the hot chocolate milk over the crumbs and beaten yolks works only if you pour in a thin stream and stir constantly. Dumped in at once, the yolks scramble and no amount of baking will smooth them out.
- The meringueSpread it over the baked pudding and return it to the oven at 350F for 12-15 minutes, until the peaks are set and coloured through. Sealing the meringue to the edges of the dish keeps it from shrinking away and weeping.
- YieldMade in the reconstructed proportions above, about six servings in a dish of roughly 1 1/2 quarts. The recipe says it may be served warm or cold; cold it will be firmer.
Bread puddings are the oldest and most durable answer to a stale loaf, and a genre of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery books was built around exactly this problem he which prompromised the housekeeper that nothing need reach the bin. What suggests a date for this version is the chocolate and the meringue: cake chocolate had become cheap enough by the closing decades of the century to be treated as an everyday flavouring rather than a luxury, and dividing a recipe into yolks below and whites above is a pattern that recurs often in the period, the same logic behind its lemon meringue and chocolate cream pies. Vanilla appears in both layers here.