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Devonshire White-Pot
Beat 4 eggs, add 1 pint of cream, and sugar and nutmeg to taste, also a handful of raisins which have been soaked in hot water to soften. Pour into a dish which has in the bottom a layer of sliced stale bread, buttered. Bake in a slow oven, and serve cold.
A baked bread custard with almost no numbers attached to it. The proportions that matter are given — four eggs to a pint of cream — and the rest is left to the cook, so the useful work is filling in temperature, time and quantities.
- The hinge: low heat, and stop while it wobblesThis is a custard, not a cake. A slow oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 275-325F; take the lower end. The pudding is done when the centre still trembles and a knife an inch from the middle comes out clean — roughly 170F internally. Pushed past that, the eggs squeeze out water and the dish weeps under the bread.
- Use a water bath"Slow oven" here means gentle, even heat. In a modern oven, set the baking dish in a larger pan and pour in boiling water halfway up the sides; this keeps the edges from setting into rubber before the centre thickens.
- A pint of creamRead as an American pint, that is 2 cups; if the recipe was copied from an English source it could be the 20-ounce imperial pint instead, so err on the smaller side. Heavy cream gives a very rich, dense set; half cream and half whole milk bakes more reliably if that richness is not wanted.
- Sugar and nutmeg "to taste"For 2 cups of dairy and 4 eggs, 1/3 cup of sugar is a fair starting point and a whole grated nutmeg's worth is too much — about a quarter teaspoon, freshly grated, is right. Pre-ground nutmeg loses its edge within months.
- Stale breadGenuinely dry, day-or-two-old bread from a firm white loaf. Fresh sliced sandwich bread collapses into paste; if that is what is to hand, dry the slices in a low oven first, then butter them.
- Timing and dishAn 8-inch square or 1 1/2-quart dish, 300F, about 50 to 70 minutes in the water bath. Serves 4 to 6.
- Serve cold, and mean itCooling is not an afterthought here — the custard firms as it chills, and the dish is meant to be cut cold, closer to a set pudding than to a spoonable bread-and-butter pudding served hot.
White-pot is a Devon and West Country dish recorded in English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and the name is often said to derive from its pallor: a pot of bread, eggs, cream and spice, whitened by the dairy. It belongs to the same family as bread-and-butter pudding, and its survival in Devon is unsurprising in a county whose cream was famous enough to be shipped and imitated.