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English Bread Pudding
Cut into half-inch pieces half pound stale crustless bread, soak in a little cold milk five minutes; then squeeze out milk and place in a bowl, stir with wooden spoon a few minutes, then and two ounces butter, three ounces sugar, three egg yolks, two whole eggs, four ounces well-picked currants, six crushed macaroons, half teaspoon vanilla essence, one saltspoon salt and two gills cream. Sharply mix with wooden spoon until well amalgamated. Lightly butter a quart pudding mould, drop preparation into it, place in a saucepan, pour in hot water up to half the height of the mould and set in oven forty minutes. Remove, unmould the pudding on a hot dish, pour a Sabayon sauce over and serve.
A restaurant-style bread pudding, steamed in a water bath rather than baked dry, and finished with a foaming wine sauce. The measurements are by weight in the professional manner of the period.
- The hinge: squeeze, then beatThe bread is soaked only five minutes and then wrung out, so it goes into the bowl damp rather than sopping. Beating it with a wooden spoon before anything else is added breaks it down into a smooth paste, which is what keeps the finished pudding fine-grained instead of lumpy with recognisable bread.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- Weights into volumesHalf a pound of bread is roughly five to six cups of half-inch cubes from a dry loaf. Two ounces of butter is four tablespoons, three ounces of sugar a scant half cup, and four ounces of currants about three quarters of a cup.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, the small black raisin, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Modern packets are usually clean, but the instruction to pick them over still applies to loose bulk fruit.
- MacaroonsThe macaroons meant here are the crisp almond kind, close to Italian amaretti, not the coconut mound or the French sandwich cookie. Six of them, crushed, add both almond flavour and a little body.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given because the water bath governs it. Set the oven at 325-350F and keep the water hot but not boiling; a hard boil will make the outside of the pudding coarse and porous.
- Testing and unmouldingForty minutes suits a quart mould, but the pudding is done when a thin knife comes out clean and the centre feels set rather than liquid. Let it stand five to ten minutes out of the water before turning out, or it may slump.
- Sabayon sauceNo method is given with this recipe: egg yolks, sugar and Marsala or sherry whisked over hot water until thick and foaming. Make it while the pudding rests, as it collapses if it stands.
- YieldA quart mould serves six modest portions, or four generous ones.
Bread pudding began as thrift, a way of using a stale loaf that was too good to throw out and too hard to eat, and by the nineteenth century it was one of the most thoroughly English things in the English kitchen. What is interesting about this version is how little of that thrift survives: the bread is stripped of its crust, enriched with cream, three egg yolks and two whole eggs, butter and crushed almond macaroons, then baked in a mould in a water bath and turned out whole under a sabayon, the Italian zabaglione by way of the French professional repertoire. That is the signature of the book's milieu. The International Cook Book (1906) came from Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and his working assumption is that a national dish is a starting point for a chef rather than a fixed household formula. The name stays English; the treatment is that of a Continental hotel kitchen.