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Bread Pudding
Mrs. Freeman.
Soak a pint of bread crumbs in milk for an hour, then squeeze with the hands to a pulp, and mix well with a gill of milk: then add three tablespoons of sugar, onequarter pound raisins, one-quarter pound of melted butter; and the yolks of four eggs; then beat the whites of the eggs to a froth and mix with the rest; turn the mixture into a dish and bake about forty minutes. Serve with wine sauce, hot or cold, according to taste.
A rich, close-textured bread pudding of the older sort — squeezed to a pulp rather than left in cubes, and lifted only by beaten egg whites. A few of the measurements need translating before you start.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. That is the milk added after the squeezing; the soaking milk is not measured, and the recipe says nothing about what to do with what is squeezed out.
- The hinge: squeeze it dryThe whole character of this pudding depends on wringing the soaked crumbs out by hand so the bread becomes a paste, then rehydrating with the measured gill. Skip that step and you get a loose, custardy pudding rather than the dense one Mrs. Freeman intended.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none, and the recipe uses no heat word at all. A moderate oven (around 350F) is a reasonable modern equivalent; bake until the centre is set and the top lightly browned.
- A pint of bread crumbsA volume measure, not a weight — roughly 2 cups of soft crumbs from stale white bread, about 4 oz. Use torn day-old bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which will not pulp.
- Quarter pound of butterHalf a cup, melted. This is a very rich ratio by modern standards; the pudding will be heavy and will firm up considerably as it cools.
- Fold, don't stir, the whitesThe four whipped whites are the only leavening. Fold them in gently at the end and get the dish into the oven promptly.
- Wine saucePeriod wine sauces of this kind are generally butter, sugar and a wine (often sherry, Madeira or a white wine), warmed and thickened slightly. Any sweet fortified-wine sauce or hard sauce serves the purpose.
- YieldAbout 4 to 6 servings from a 1-quart baking dish. Butter the dish well.
Bread pudding is the oldest kind of thrift cookery in the English kitchen: a way of turning stale loaf into a dish worth putting on the table, and it survived into nineteenth-century American cookbooks precisely because bread was baked at home in quantity and went hard fast. What marks this version as belonging to its period is the richness — a quarter pound each of butter and raisins, four eggs, and a wine sauce — which turns a household economy into a company dessert. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, usually dated 1874, with later printings) was compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why the recipe carries Mrs. Freeman's name rather than an author's; such community cookbooks were often sold to raise money for charitable causes, and this one is generally credited as among the earliest American examples of the form. The absence of an oven temperature is typical: the cooks who contributed were working with wood or coal ranges and judged heat by hand and habit, not by number.