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Caramel Bread Pudding
3 cupfuls breadcrumbs 1 quart hot milk 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Grated nutmeg to taste 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful sugar 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco Whipped cream Put Crisco, crumbs, and salt into a basin, add hot milk and soak ten minutes. Melt sugar and brown it lightly in a small pan over fire, then add it to the bread, with eggs well beaten, and flavorings. Pour into Criscoed pudding dish and bake in moderate oven till firm. Serve with whipped cream.
A custard-set bread pudding whose only real trick is the dry caramel. The stray "1/3 cupful rice" at the end belongs to the next recipe in the book and has nothing to do with this one.
- The caramel is the hingeMelt the cup of sugar dry in a heavy pan over medium heat, without stirring much, and take it off the moment it turns the color of weak tea. It keeps darkening off the heat, and burnt caramel makes the whole pudding bitter.
- Adding hot caramel to the milkAdding the hot caramel -- Pour the caramel into the soaked crumb mixture in a thin stream while stirring. It will hiss and may seize into hard threads; keep stirring and they dissolve in the hot milk. The recipe adds the beaten eggs at the same moment, but it is safer to let the mixture cool to warm first, or the eggs may scramble.
- "Moderate oven"350F. Figure 45 to 60 minutes in a 2-quart dish; it is firm when a knife inserted an inch from the center comes out clean and the middle still trembles slightly.
- Water bathThe recipe does not call for one, but in a modern oven it helps to set the pudding dish in a larger pan with an inch of hot water to keep the egg from curdling at the edges.
- CriscoThe 4 tablespoons of shortening are there because this is an advertising cookbook. Butter gives a better pudding and the same result; "Criscoed pudding dish" just means greased.
- BreadcrumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old white bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which will drink the milk and go pasty. Three cupfuls loosely packed is right for a quart of milk.
- Lemon extractA full teaspoon of extract is assertive by current standards. The grated zest of one lemon, or half the extract, sits better against the caramel.
- YieldServes six to eight. Good warm; the caramel flavor deepens after a few hours, and it holds three days covered in the refrigerator.
Bread pudding was the standard way of using stale loaf ends in an era when bread was bought or baked daily and rarely wasted, and the caramel version is simply the frugal pudding dressed up with burnt sugar, a cheap and dramatic flavoring long used in confectionery and gravy browning alike. What dates this particular version is the shortening: The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to teach cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, then only a few years on the market, and its recipes systematically substitute Crisco wherever butter, lard or suet would have stood. Putting four tablespoons of fat into a bread pudding, a dish that needs none, shows the book's purpose plainly enough; the odd fragment of the following rice recipe left clinging to the end of the page may be no more than an artefact of how the page came down to us.