WhitePot Bread Pudding - 18th Century Cooking Series S2E10

Foods of the 18th century were often very
regional. Take for instance, this little dish, it's sweet, its buttery, its custardy,
and its bready. Its a bready little dessert. Its also got raisins and dates
in it.

In many places, this might be called a bread pudding, but this regional variation
is famously known as white pot. We found a number of white pot recipes, some
as early as the 16th century and others right on into the 18th century. The term white pot
is a provincial phrase originating from southwest England, specifically the Devon area and it
simply means white pudding. Recipes for white pot change very little over
the years.

They primarily consist of bread, sometimes rice, sugar, eggs, usually cream,
some spice, and sometimes a little bit of fruit. Lets get started. The first thing
we need to do is preheat our oven. Were going to be using the Dutch oven today.

If
youre going to use a Dutch oven you need to get an ember bed ready for that. If youre
using a wood fired oven, that needs to be fired up, but youll need to let it cool
down a little bit to get to the right temperature, and if youre using a regular home oven,
you need to preheat it to 350 degrees. Were using our everted saucepan today.
You could use a pipkin or a boiler or whatever you have available. Were going to begin
by placing a pint of cream in our saucepan.

Now lets place a stick of cinnamon in that,
a pinch of salt here, a little bit of mace, and now lets grind some fresh nutmeg. As soon as this begins to simmer, youre
going to need to remove it from the heat and let it cool down. Now lets take care of
our eggs. We need two whole eggs in this and we need one egg yolk, and now we need two to three tablespoons of sugar.

Now all
we have to do is whisk this together. Now that our cream is simmering, lets go
ahead and take it off and let it cool down. Im going to take some nice white bread
now and Im going to slice it very, very thin and then take off the crust so Im
left with nothing but the crumb. Well need enough crumb to fill up our baking dish.

In this
case Im using one of our tin eating bowls. You could also, if you wanted a larger one,
use one of these milk pans, but you definitely need about twice the amount of ingredients
and you need to increase the baking time. Each one of these slices, Im going to butter
quite liberally on one side. Im going to end up using about a half a cup of butter,
one stick.

While weve got our butter out, its time to butter our pan. The bowl needs
to be buttered liberally or the sugar thats in our white pot will make it very difficult
to release. And now our cream has cooled a bit, we can
take out the cinnamon stick and now were going to add just a little bit of the warm
cream mixture into the eggs while we whisk it just a little bit first to temper the eggs
so that the eggs dont curdle. Once weve got a little bit in, weve got that totally
whisked in; we can start adding the rest little by little.

Now lets get started with our layering.
Were going to start by putting in bread on the bottom of our bowl. We want to put
the butter side down. Were going to put in two pieces here and well cover up the
bottom of the bowl and now lets put a layer of raisins and dates in on top of that. Thats
good.

Were going to do another layer, butter side down of the bread. So we want to make
sure that there are no air gaps so if you need to tear your bread up a little bit to
fill in the gaps do that. Our raisins and dates again. Once weve got our second layer
here, we can start to add some of our custard mixture.

Were going to just pour in enough
that it soaks into these two bottom layers but doesnt come up above the top of that
bread. So that looks pretty good. Lets just do
another layer. Our dish is filled up.

Lets put our custard
mixture in until it fills it right up and soaks in. That looks good. I think well
be able to use just about all of it. That looks good.

Now were going to take our
final pieces of buttered bread and were just going to fill up the top. Were going
to put this in butter side up instead of butter side down and fill that top. Oh yeah, there we go. Were going to tamp
that down just a little bit so that it soaks up from the bottom and now were going to
add some sugar to the top of it.

We probably got another tablespoon here or so. Now thats
ready to bake. Now its time to bake this guy. Were
going to be using this Dutch oven.

Ive got it already preheated some, and were
going to set it on a ring of coals that weve got already set up here. Now lets place
our trivet inside and then we can add our pudding, our white pot in, right up on top,
and we can set our lid on. Im going to put some coals up on top. Again, usually we just need a ring of coals that go around the outside edge here.

Okay, weve got our ring of coals up on
top so Im going to keep watching this and at times Ill have to renew the coals up
on top and maybe even tuck a few more in the bottom. While white pots originated from the Devon
area, they were certainly well known to colonial cooks as well. While they might not have kept
the same name, they kept the same construction. Bread puddings are becoming popular again
today and some chefs have even discovered this interesting variation.

Its starting to smell really good and its
only been about 35 minutes. Lets take a quick look at this. As you can see this is
already well on its way, so were going to take this out. This is done.

Were going to let this cool and then turn
it out onto a plate. If you happen to have a salamander, you can
heat it up very hot, then sprinkle some sugar on top of your white pot and brown it. You
can also do that with a kitchen torch or with a broiler. Just be careful not to burn your
white pot.

A nice finishing touch would be some fresh
cream poured on top or maybe a little sac which is what we call sweet cherry, was very
common in 18th century recipes. Wow, that is excellent. Its buttery, the sweetness
of the sweetmeats and the custard really sets it off. Its delicious.

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