The CWI Cookbook

Posts Tagged ‘bread’

 Scraps, crusts and crumbs of bread, 1 lb.
1 pint milk
3 eggs
3 oz. sugar
Nutmeg, ginger or allspice
2 oz. suet, chopped
4 oz. currants (optional)

Put any scraps of bread into a clean saucepan; to about a pound, put a pint of milk; set it on the trivet till it boils; beat it up quite smooth; then break in three eggs, three ounces of sugar, with a little nutmeg, ginger or allspice, and stir it all well together. Butter a dish big enough to hold it, put in the pudding, and have ready two ounces of suet chopped very fine, strew it over the top of the pudding, and bake it three quarters of an hour; four ounces of currants will make it much better.

From The Cook’s Oracle by William Kitchiner, MD, New York, 1829

Comment: This is bread pudding under a catchier, frugal-sounding name. Of course any true frugality is promptly undercut by the addition of expensive spices, fruits, fats and suchlike ingredients, but in that time as in our own, image trumps reality every time.

 6 oz. stale bread, crusts removed
5 eggs
1/2 oz. parsley
1/4 oz. lemon thyme

Instructions: Soften the bread thoroughly in a dish; with a little boiling water, covering it over, and let it soak for an hour–then mash it up with a fork, picking out the hard pieces, and adding the parsley and lemon thyme, chopped fine with salt and pepper, as seasoning. Beat the eggs well, mix them intimately with the other ingredients, and bake in a buttered dish (buttered cold) for about 40 minutes. Turn it out of the dish, garnished with parsley, and serve with brown sauce.

From The Home Manual, or Economical Cook and House-Book by Elizabeth Nicholson, 1865.

Comment: Every household kept a jar in the kitchen into which any leftover bit of bread was put, down to the crumbs swept up off the tablecloth at the end of a meal. When you have to make every bit of your own bread with your own hands, pans and oven, you have a different feeling towards it than you do about a loaf for which you gave $.69 at the market! The breadcrumb jar was reached for any time some stale crumbs were need for stuffing a turkey, making a coating for a fried food, or perhaps for thickening a sauce. And if it ever got too full, or if things got truly tight in the food department, why, with the addition of a few eggs, voila! A relatively quick and easy meal, either breakfast or dinner, could be produced.