“After chapel the children march to their dining-rooms and walk in, and stand round the table and sing their grace before dinner. On Sundays they get mutton and potatoes and bread, and on some other days meat and potatoes, and on some days fish and pudding. For breakfast they have bread, with butter or dripping, and boiled milk, or cocoa, or porridge; for tea they get bread-and-butter and milk, and for supper bread, with cheese, butter, or jam.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
1 small baker’s stale loaf Butter 3 eggs ½ cup sugar ¼ teaspoon salt 1 quart milk Remove end crusts from bread, cut loaf in one-half inch slices, spread each slice generously with butter; arrange in buttered pudding-dish, buttered side down. Beat eggs slightly, add sugar, salt, and milk; strain, and pour over bread; let stand thirty minutes. Bake one hour in slow oven, covering the first half-hour of baking. The top of pudding should be well browned. Serve with Hard or Creamy Sauce. Three-fourths cup raisins, parboiled in boiling water to cover and seeded, may be sprinkled between layers of bread.
Sources: The passage is from G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton, The Children's Book of London, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Farmer, The Boston cooking-school cook book of 1896, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — plum cloth, pudding stamp.