This Old-Fashioned Cheese Pudding is a quaint vintage British recipe that makes good use of a few pantry ingredients – cheese, milk, eggs, breadcrumbs, and some seasonings. Its taste and texture are very similar to a quiche, so this cheese pudding is ideal if you’re looking for an easy, crustless quiche recipe. It’s a delicious lunch option paired with a salad or as an accompaniment for dinner, perhaps with some sausages, cooked vegetables, and gravy or some baked beans.
Recipes like Cheese pudding are great for today’s home cooks as they are budget-friendly, tasty, and easy to prepare. They connect us with simple ingredients and good home cooking, whilst also being comforting and packed full of history and nostalgia.
Victorian cheese pudding
Cheese pudding was a popular nursery dish during the Victorian era, where it was served as a wholesome meal for young children. You can find 2 Victorian recipes for Cheese Pudding sourced from a 1844 cookbook on my blog via the previous link.
One of these recipes includes a small amount of cream, which would create a richer pudding, and one recipe suggests serving the cheese pudding with extra cheese or a tart.
Home-front cheese pudding
The cheese pudding recipe I have prepared here is based on a recipe from the 1940s British wartime kitchen. Cheese was rationed during the 1940s and early 1950s, so a cheese pudding would have used up a lot of precious cheese, but as vegetarians could exchange their meat rations for extra eggs and cheese, a cheese pudding would have been a wholesome way to make good use of those ingredients. Or perhaps someone would forgo their weekly rationed cheese so that the whole family could enjoy a cheese pudding as a treat.
During the 1940s, rationing, the British government actively encouraged people to choose cheese over meat with their ” Choose Cheese ” campaign!
If you’re interested in learning more about food history from the 1940s era, the videos over on The Imperial War Museums website contain ”News Flash” features which were broadcast to the public in British cinemas. You can watch them on their blog post ‘‘8 Handy Tips from The Ministry of Food”.
I used seeded breadcrumbs for this cheese pudding recipe, so you may see some seeds within the pudding in the image above. Any type of bread will be fine for this cheese pudding. If you require a gluten-free cheese pudding, you can use gluten-free breadcrumbs.
This cheese pudding would be a very nice accompaniment to sausages such as these Green Lentil Sausages, which I prepared from an old Victorian recipe! Some baked beans would be very nice too, or for a light lunch, this Victorian Plain Salad would be excellent with the cheese pudding.
Old-Fashioned Cheese Pudding
Equipment
- 7-8 inch flan or pie dish
- mixing bowl
- cheese grater
- mixing spoon or cutlery fork
Ingredients
- 2 eggs [medium sized]
- 285 ml milk [½ pint]
- 115 grams cheese [4 oz – I used Cathedral City mature cheddar]
- 45 grams breadcrumbs [1 slice of bread, about ¾ cup of breadcrumbs – not heaped measurement]
- ¼ tsp mustard powder [or replace with 2 pinches of ground turmeric and 2 pinches of ground black pepper]
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 160 Fan oven, 180℃, Gas 4, 350℉.
- Grease the pie dish with some margarine or butter.
- Pour the milk and eggs into a mixing bowl and mix.
- Add the breadcrumbs, mustard powder, and cheese.
- Season with some salt & pepper (if using ground turmeric and black pepper as a mustard replacement, don't add extra pepper at this stage).
- Mix well.
- Pour the mixture into the greased pie dish.
- Bake for about 25-30 minutes until the pudding is firm and golden. If it's still wobbly in the middle, bake for a further few more minutes.Allow to sit for 5 minutes just for the pudding to settle, before slicing or scooping out portions.
- Enjoy with a salad or cooked vegetables of your choice. A few sausages are a nice addition, perhaps with some gravy or baked beans.A chilled slice of cheese pudding straight from the refrigerator makes a tasty snack.
Notes
- Nutritional content is provided for guidance purposes only and is not an exact calculation, as ingredients vary. For exact measurements, please calculate the nutritional values using your own specific ingredients. One fourth of this cheese pudding has roughly: 13 g protein, 15 g fat, 1 mg iron, 325 mg calcium, 1 g fibre, 298 mg sodium, 526 IU vitamin A, 119 mg cholesterol, and 4 g sugar.
- Store cheese pudding within the refrigerator, covered, for up to 3 days.
- Reheat in a warm oven.
- I used a slice of seeded bread for this recipe, but any sliced bread prepared into breadcrumbs will do fine. Stale bread is perfect for this recipe, and it prevents the bread from being thrown out!
- To prepare breadcrumbs, I simply grated the slice of bread with a cheese grater.
- For a gluten-free cheese pudding, use gluten-free bread to prepare breadcrumbs.
- For a dairy-free cheese pudding, use a dairy-free milk such as soya, almond or oat milk.
- For a mustard-free cheese pudding, replace the mustard with a few pinches of ground turmeric and a few pinches of ground black pepper – this provides the pudding with a nice golden colour and adds to the seasoning.
If you bake this cheese pudding, please leave a comment below as I would love to hear how you got on.
Love testing historical recipes?
I am starting an exciting new project where you can join in with the fun! Do have a read about the new project, and hopefully, it will interest you, and many of my lovely readers will come on board. Let’s build a fun community sharing our experiences testing historical recipes.
You can find out more information via the following link, which will take you to the untested historical recipe collaboration section of my blog.
Hope to see you there! Any questions, don’t hesitate to send me an email via my contact page, which has my email address. All the best, Leigh x