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Baked Cracker Pudding
Mrs. H. P. Stowell Two quarts of sweet milk, seven Boston butter crackers rolled, three eggs, a little nutmeg, a little salt, sweeten with sugar to taste. Bake two hours and a-half in a moderate oven.
A milk custard thickened with cracker crumbs rather than bread or rice — a large, plain family pudding that bakes slowly and unattended. The proportions are sound, but two of the ingredients need translating.
- Boston butter crackersA plain factory cracker of the period, larger and blander than a modern saltine and only lightly salted; period descriptions of the Boston cracker run to thick and hard rather than thin. Seven rolled fine give perhaps a cup or so of crumbs; use plain unsalted or lightly salted crackers and measure the crumbs rather than counting biscuits.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabber a nineteenth-century kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk gives the body the recipe expects; skim will bake thin and weep.
- A moderate ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 350F, though for a custard this size 325F is the safer reading of the instruction. Two and a half hours at 350F in a modern oven with dry, even heat risks curdling the edges before the centre sets.
- Sweeten to tasteFor two quarts of milk, something in the region of 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar would suit a pudding meant as a dessert; much less than half a cup and it reads closer to a savoury baked custard.
- Water bathThe single change worth making. Set the dish in a pan of hot water; the crumbs give some insurance against curdling, but three eggs to two quarts of milk is a lean custard and it relies on gentle heat to hold together.
- Knowing when it is doneA knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean while the centre still trembles. It will finish setting as it cools, and it is better slightly under than grainy.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk plus eggs and crumbs makes about ten cups of pudding — a 3-quart dish, serving eight to ten. It halves comfortably in a 9-inch square pan, where the shallower depth will cut the time considerably; check it well before the full two and a half hours.
- NutmegGrate it over the surface at the end rather than stirring it through. Two and a half hours of baking flattens the aroma of anything mixed into the milk.
Cracker puddings belong to the large nineteenth-century family of milk puddings that used whatever starch the pantry offered — bread, rice, tapioca, sago, or, in a town household with a grocer nearby, factory crackers. The Boston cracker and the closely related butter cracker were among the earliest mass-produced American biscuits, sold from barrels by weight, and cooks treated them as a shelf-stable stand-in for stale bread; broken crackers were cheap and got used up this way. Subscription cookbooks of the period — among them the Chicago community compilation The Home Cook Book, published in 1874 with later reprints — were compiled from recipes contributed by named local women, and they assume a reader who already knows what a moderate oven feels like and how sweet she likes her pudding. Such books were assembled as much by donation as by design.