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Chocolate Pudding
Soak until soft, a cupful of bread crumbs in a cupful of milk, containing a pinch of soda. Add to them the yolks of three eggs beaten light, with two tablespoonfuls of granulated sugar. Have ready four tablespoonfuls of grated chocolate rubbed smooth, in two tablespoonfuls of milk. Beat this into the mixture and, last of all, stir in lightly the stiffened whites of the three eggs. Turn into a greased pudding mold, boil or steam for two hours. Serve on a platter and heap whipped cream about the pudding.
A steamed bread-crumb pudding of the plainest sort, lifted by whipped egg whites and a small amount of unsweetened chocolate. The hinge is the mold: it must be no more than two-thirds full and tightly covered, or the steam condenses into the batter and you get a wet, dense pudding.
- The chocolate"Grated chocolate" in a recipe of this kind most likely means a hard block of plain unsweetened chocolate, grated on a fine grater; four tablespoonfuls is roughly 1 oz. Sweetened cake chocolate was also sold, so taste before assuming. Cocoa powder is not a straight substitute at this ratio, and modern sweetened baking chocolate will change the sugar balance.
- SweetnessTwo tablespoons of sugar for the whole pudding is very restrained by present taste, and if the chocolate is unsweetened the pudding will read as bitter. The recipe leaves the cream unsweetened as written; sweetening it is the obvious remedy, or add sugar to the yolks knowing you are departing from the original.
- The pinch of sodaSoda was commonly added in period recipes where the milk might be slightly sour, and it also darkens chocolate. Whatever the reason here, it does little with fresh milk, and too much will give a soapy, faintly metallic taste. Leave it out or keep it to a scant eighth of a teaspoon.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from a day-old white loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which drink far more milk and set up gluey. A cupful of soft crumbs is about 1½ oz.
- The moldA 1-quart pudding basin or steamed-pudding mold, buttered, filled two-thirds, and covered with a lid or a pleated sheet of foil tied down. Stand it on a trivet in a covered pot with boiling water halfway up the sides and top up with boiling water as it goes.
- TimeTwo hours suits a full-sized mold. In a well-covered pot at a steady low boil, 1 to 1½ hours is usually enough; test with a skewer, which should come out clean, and stop there.
- UnmoldingLet it stand five minutes off the heat before turning out, or the outer layer tears. Run a knife round the rim first.
- YieldServes four to six as written, generously with the cream.
Steamed crumb puddings like this one are the thrifty end of a long English tradition: a boiled pudding in a cloth or mold was the standard sweet course in kitchens where the oven was small, expensive to heat, or already full. Bread crumbs stand in for flour and put stale bread to use, and beaten whites do the lifting work — a technique that lets a cook get something close to a cake without a reliable oven. Chocolate is the newer element. Ground and cake chocolate had become cheap and widely sold in American groceries, and chocolate versions of established puddings, custards and sauces seem to have been common in cookbooks of the period, usually with only an ounce or two per dish. That restraint, and the very small amount of sugar, suggest a pudding whose richness was probably expected to arrive at the table in the form of cream heaped around it.