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Bread Custard Pudding
Use Karo, Red Label in the preceding recipe, flavor with nut meg and bake in a large dish, putting thin slices of buttered bread over the top. Serve cold or warm.
This is a variation entry: it assumes you have the preceding custard recipe in front of you and only tells you what to change. Read it as instructions for a baked custard sweetened with corn syrup, poured into a large dish and capped with buttered bread.
- It depends on the recipe above itThe proportions live in the preceding entry, not here. Any standard baked custard ratio works as a base: about 4 eggs to 1 quart of scalded milk, with the syrup standing in for the sugar.
- Karo Red LabelKaro was sold in several grades. Red Label was the darker, fuller-flavored corn syrup, as against the pale Blue Label. Dark corn syrup is the direct modern equivalent; molasses is too assertive and will fight the nutmeg.
- Syrup changes the setCorn syrup is hygroscopic and does not crystallise as granulated sugar does, so a syrup-sweetened custard tends to set a little softer and may brown sooner. Do not read slow setting as underbaking.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Baked custards want 325F, no hotter, or the eggs curdle and weep. A water bath reaching halfway up the dish is the usual insurance in a large, deep dish like this one.
- DonenessPull it when the edges are set and the center still trembles as a single mass; carryover finishes it. An instant-read thermometer in the middle should show about 170-175F.
- The bread toppingSlices buttered on top, laid butter-side up, will crisp and gild. If they are browning well before the custard sets, lay them on for the last 20 minutes rather than at the start, or tent with foil.
- NutmegGrate it whole over the surface just before baking. Pre-ground nutmeg loses much of its aroma with keeping and can read as dusty rather than warm.
- YieldA quart of custard in a 2-quart dish serves six to eight. Served cold, it firms noticeably and slices better; served warm, it is closer to a spoon pudding.
Karo corn syrup came onto the American market in the opening years of the twentieth century, and the company that made it pushed small promotional booklets of this kind hard, showing housekeepers that the syrup could replace sugar in almost anything a household already made. That may be why this entry reads as a substitution rather than a full recipe: the thing being sold, after all, is the syrup, not the pudding. The pudding itself is much older, a thrift dish in the long line of English bread-and-butter puddings, where stale bread and a few eggs were stretched into a dinner sweet. Setting the bread on top rather than layering it through the custard, as here, gives a crisp buttered lid over a plain baked custard, and nutmeg has been the near-automatic spice for milk puddings in English and American cooking for centuries.