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Sweet Manchester Pudding
One pint bread crumbs, three eggs, one cup sugar, one pint milk, piece of butter size of an egg, flavour with lemon; put a layer of bread crumbs in the dish, then one of jain, and so on till full; finish with crumbs; pour the custard on the top. To be eaten with cream.
A layered breadcrumb-and-jam pudding baked in custard, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew what a pudding dish did in the oven. The original gives no temperature, no time and one obvious typesetter's error.
- "Jain" is jamThe word is a misprint for jam, and raspberry is one common choice in English Manchester puddings. Use a thick preserve; a loose jelly will bleed into the custard and slacken it.
- MeasuresA pint of breadcrumbs is a volume, not a weight — roughly 4 oz of fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, loosely packed. Butter "the size of an egg" is about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- Melt the butter into the milkThe recipe never says where the butter goes. Warm it with the milk, then whisk that into the beaten eggs and sugar off the heat so the custard pours evenly over the layers.
- Flavouring with lemonIn 1877 this meant either grated zest or a few drops of lemon extract. Zest steeped in the warm milk and strained out gives a cleaner result than bottled extract.
- Oven and timeBake at 325–350F for 45 to 55 minutes. The custard should be set at the edges with a slight wobble at the centre; carry-over heat finishes it as it stands.
- A water bath helpsSet the dish in a roasting pan with an inch of hot water. Bread crumbs insulate unevenly, and direct oven heat tends to curdle the custard at the sides before the middle sets.
- Let the crumbs soakPour the custard over and wait 15 minutes before baking. Dry crumbs that go straight into the oven stay gritty and leave a pool of liquid custard beneath them.
- YieldFills a 1½-quart dish and serves six. "To be eaten with cream" means cold pouring cream, not whipped — and the pudding is better warm than hot.
Manchester pudding belongs to a large Victorian family of puddings built on breadcrumbs, milk and eggs, the frugal English answer to using up stale bread; the layering with jam and the finish of custard are what distinguish it from a plain bread pudding. Its association with Manchester is traditional rather than documented, and some English versions crowned it with meringue, which this Canadian recipe omits in favour of a jug of cream. That it appears in The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 from contributions by "ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns," is telling: recipes like this one were copied from English kitchens into North American ones almost unchanged, and the abbreviated style — no oven heat, no baking time, the butter left unassigned — reflects a book written by cooks for cooks who already knew the shape of the dish.