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Bread Pudding
(Budino di pane) Soft bread crumb, five ounces.
Butter, three and a half ounces.
Four eggs.
Taste of lemon peel.
A pinch of salt.
Cut the bread crumb into pieces and soak in cold milk. Then rub though a sieve. Melt the butter in a double boiler (in a vessel immersed in boiling water) and mix with the eggs until butter and eggs are incorporated to each other.
Add the bread crumb and the sugar and mix well. Pour the mixture in a mold greased with butter and sprinkled with bread crumb ground fine and bake like other puddings. 203
A plain steamed-or-baked bread custard in the Italian style, with the crumb sieved smooth rather than left in cubes. The original leaves two quantities out, so read the notes before you start.
- The sugar is missingSugar appears in the method but never in the ingredient list. For five ounces of crumb and four eggs, something in the range of 3 to 4 ounces (about 1/2 cup) would suit a pudding of this size, but the original genuinely does not say.
- The milk is unmeasured tooYou are told to soak the crumb in cold milk and then sieve it, with no amount given. Add just enough to saturate the bread — roughly 3/4 to 1 cup for five ounces of crumb — and squeeze or press it through so the paste is thick, not soupy.
- Weights, not cupsFive ounces of soft crumb is a large volume — the torn interior of most of a small loaf. Three and a half ounces of butter is 7 tablespoons. Use a scale; measuring crumb by cup will throw the ratio badly.
- "Soft bread crumb" means the crumb, not crumbsThe Italian mollica is the white interior of the loaf, crusts discarded. The fine ground crumb used to coat the mold is a separate thing — dry breadcrumbs.
- Keep the butter warm, not hotThe double boiler is there so the melted butter and eggs emulsify rather than scramble. Take the butter off the heat before beating in the eggs, and add them one at a time.
- "Bake like other puddings"The original gives neither a temperature nor a water bath; both are inferred from ordinary pudding practice. A buttered mold set in a pan of hot water, in a moderate oven of about 325 to 350F, until the center is just set -- roughly 45 to 60 minutes for a 1-quart mold -- is a reasonable modern reading, and the bath guards against curdling a custard this eggy.
- Lemon peel"Taste of lemon peel" is most likely finely grated zest, though the original gives no quantity and does not say when to add it. About half a lemon's worth suits these amounts; avoid the white pith.
- YieldProbably about six small portions, though the original gives no yield. Turn it out warm; it firms as it cools and slices cleanly the next day.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was written for American households curious about Italian cooking, and it draws heavily on the tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi, whose La scienza in cucina (1891) contains a number of budini of broadly this kind. Budino covers a wide family of molded, egg-set puddings rather than the soft spoon dessert the English word suggests, and budino di pane belongs to the frugal end of it: stale white bread, softened in milk and pushed through a sieve, becomes the body of a dessert in place of flour or ground almonds. The habit of buttering the mold and dusting it with fine crumb is the same trick used for cake tins in Italian and French practice of the period, and it is what lets the pudding release whole. The bare instructions and the missing quantities assume a cook who already knows how a pudding is put together and needs only the proportions.