A Whitpot

History

A whitpot begins with day-old bread: half a loaf cut into dice, soaked in two quarts of milk with six eggs, rose-water, nutmeg and half a pound of sugar, then baked slowly for an hour under a cover of pastry until the bread swells into a sweet, spiced custard. The name reaches back into older English cookery -- the earliest bread-and-butter puddings were called whitepot, enriched with either bone marrow or butter, and the same idea made with rice in place of bread became the ancestor of British rice pudding. Recipes for it run from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth and change very little: bread, sometimes rice, sugar, eggs, usually cream, some spice, and sometimes a little fruit. The dish is bound up above all with Devon and the southwest of England, where "white pot" was a provincial word simply meaning a white pudding, named by one account for the pale, glistening cream that filled the baking pot. It was long familiar to colonial cooks by Simmons's day, and her rendering is one of the leaner ones -- milk in place of cream, no fruit, and a pastry lid rather than a crust beneath. What the record does not keep is anything particular to this American version: who ate it, what it meant at the table, or why the leaner milk-and-bread form was chosen over the richer creamed whitepots of the English books. Even the name carries more than one explanation, and the sources that describe the dish do not settle which is right.

Ingredients

• 1/2 loaf bread
• 2 quarts milk
• 6 eggs
• rose-water
• nutmeg
• 1/2 pound sugar
• paste (No. 1)

Instructions

1. Cut half a loaf of bread into dice.
2. Pour over it 2 quarts milk, 6 eggs, rose-water, nutmeg and 1/2 pound sugar.
3. Put into a dish and cover with paste (No. 1).
4. Bake slow one hour.