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Cream Pudding
Stir together one pint cream, three ounces sugar, the yolks of three eggs, and a little grated nutmeg; add the well-beaten whites, stirring lightly, and pour into a buttered pie-plate on which has been sprinkled the crumbs of stale bread to about the thickness of an ordinary crust; sprinkle over the top a layer of bread-crumbs and bake.
A baked custard given a crumb lining instead of pastry. The original assumes you know how a custard behaves in the oven, so the two things missing are the temperature and the point at which to stop.
- The hinge: low heat, no boilBake at 325F, no hotter. A cream custard that reaches a simmer curdles and weeps, and this one has no flour or starch to protect it. Setting the pie plate in a pan of hot water gives you a margin.
- DonenessIt is done when the edges are set and the centre still trembles as a single mass, roughly 170-175F at the middle. Expect 35-45 minutes in a shallow pie plate. It firms further as it cools.
- Three ounces sugarA weight, not a volume: about 6 to 7 tablespoons of granulated sugar, or a scant half cup. Modern palates may find it restrained.
- One pint creamTwo cups. Nineteenth-century "cream" was skimmed from unhomogenised milk and varied widely in richness, often falling short of today's heavy cream; half-and-half, or one cup heavy cream and one cup whole milk, may be closer than straight heavy cream.
- Stale bread-crumbsCoarse crumbs from a dry, close-textured white loaf, not the fine dried kind sold in canisters, which pack down and turn pasty. Butter the plate generously so the bottom layer clings and toasts rather than floating.
- Folding the whites"Stirring lightly" means folding. Beat the whites only to soft peaks; stiff whites will not disperse into a thin custard and leave meringue-like streaks on the surface.
- NutmegGrate it fresh from a whole nutmeg. Pre-ground loses most of its aroma within months, and here it is the only flavouring.
- YieldOne nine-inch pie plate, four to six servings. Good warm or at room temperature; refrigerate leftovers, as this is a cream and egg custard.
Baked custards thickened with nothing but egg were among the oldest sweet dishes in the English-American repertoire, and the crumb lining here is a frugal substitute for pastry: it gives the spoon something to catch and uses up the end of a loaf, a habit visible in a good many nineteenth-century puddings. The Dixie Cook Book, published in the early 1880s, carries a number of these plain cream and bread puddings alongside more elaborate boiled and steamed ones. Nutmeg as the sole seasoning is characteristic of the period; it was a standard spice for milk and egg dishes on both sides of the Atlantic well before the nineteenth century, and recipe writers rarely explained the choice.