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Bread Pudding
One quart sweet milk, quart bread-crumbs, four eggs, four tablespoons sugar; soak bread in half the milk until soft; mash fine, add the rest of milk, the well-beaten eggs and sugar, and a teacup raisins; bake one hour, serve warm with warm sauce or maple sugar hard sauce; or, slice, butter, and spread bread with preserves or jelly, place nicely in a baking-dish. Make a custard of one pint of sweet milk, three eggs, and sugar to taste, and while boiling pour it over bread. Place in oven and bake till brown, eat with or without sauce.
Two puddings in one entry: a plain soaked-bread custard, and a layered version with buttered bread and jam. Both are set custards, and the temperature at which you bake them is what decides whether they come out silky or weeping.
- Set the oven at 325-350FThe book gives no temperature because it assumes a wood range and a cook who judges by hand. A custard baked much above 350F curdles and separates. An hour at 325-350F is right for a 2-quart dish; the pudding is done when the centre is just set and a knife an inch from the middle comes out clean.
- Sweet milkMeans fresh, unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk also kept in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Whole milk is the direct substitute; half milk and half cream gives a richer set.
- A quart of bread-crumbsThis is a volume measure of soft crumbs torn from stale loaf bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters today. Roughly 6-8 oz of day-old white bread. Packaged dry crumbs will absorb far more liquid and produce a paste.
- A teacup of raisinsThe teacup was never a standardised measure; period sources put it at roughly 4 to 6 fl oz, so call it about three-quarters of a cup. Raisins of the period often needed seeding and stemming; modern seedless raisins go in as they are, though a brief soak in hot water keeps them from drawing moisture out of the custard.
- Pour the custard on hotIn the second version the milk-and-egg mixture is poured over the bread "while boiling." Take that as scalding hot rather than at a rolling boil, which would scramble the eggs.
- A water bath is worth the troubleNeither version calls for one, but standing the dish in a roasting pan of hot water insulates the edges and stops the outside setting into rubber before the middle firms. Particularly useful for the layered jam version, which has less crumb to buffer the eggs.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with sugar, here maple sugar, and served cold in a firm pat that melts over the hot pudding. It is not cooked. Allow about half the weight of butter to sugar and beat until pale.
- YieldThe first version, a quart of milk and a quart of crumbs, suits a dish of about 2 quarts and will serve six to eight.
Bread pudding is the oldest sort of thrift cookery, a way of using bread that has gone stale before it goes mouldy, and it appears in English household books long before it reached American ones. The pairing with maple sugar hard sauce points north, where maple sugar was sold in cakes. Recipes of this era routinely omit oven temperatures and baking-dish sizes, and the vagueness is not carelessness so much as an assumption that the reader has stood at a range her whole life.