Chocolate Bread Pudding

So June 26 was National Chocolate Pudding, and I posted an easy chocolate pudding recipe.

Here's a Chocolate Bread Pudding recipe that's great. It's from Fannie Farmer's
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896), a book that is one of the best known and most influential of American cookbooks and has been in print from 1896 until today ( the newer editions are updated and revised).

Interesting note, the original publishers, Little, Brown, were afraid of losing money on a cookbook, and they required Fannie Farmer to pay for the first printing herself. However, she kept ownership of the copyright on the book. Definitely a mistake on Little, Brown's part.

The first edition of 3000 quickly sold out; it was reprinted twice in 1897 and once a year thereafter until 1906, when a revised edition was issued. New and revised editions, in multiple reprints, continue to be published. It was reprinted in England and translated into French, Spanish, Japanese and Braille.

O.K. continuing the theme of frugality in this new economy, you can use whatever left over bread you have. I also have lots of leftover chocolate from chocolate tastings, so for me this is definitely being thrifty. Bread and Chocolate, a theme from a past Blog.

Chocolate Bread Pudding

Ingredients

2 cups stale bread torn up (this is always a great variable: French bread, cinnamon bread, challah?)/in the original recipe it says crumbs, but I use pieces of bread and that's what's really called for.
4 cups scalded milk (or 3 cups milk/1 cup cream)
2 squares Baker's chocolate (or a nice dark 70% or higher chocolate/I use about 6 oz.)
2/3 cup sugar
3 eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla

Soak bread in milk thirty minutes; melt chocolate in saucepan placed over hot water, add one-half sugar and enough milk taken from bread and milk to make of consistency to pour; add to mixture with remaining sugar, salt, vanilla, and eggs slightly beaten; turn into buttered pudding-dish and bake on hour in a moderate oven.