Line a well-buttered pudding-dish with a rich puff-paste and bake. Then beat 1 cup of butter with ½ pound of pulverized sugar. Add the grated rind and juice of a lemon and beat well with the yolks of 6 eggs; add the whites beaten to a froth. Fill the pudding-dish with the mixture and bake until done.
This is a baked lemon curd in a puff-paste case — closer to what English cooks called a lemon cheesecake than to a steamed pudding. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows what "bake until done" looks like, so the numbers below fill in the gaps.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe filling is essentially lemon curd with whipped whites folded in, and it curdles if pushed. Bake it at 325°F and pull it when the centre still has a slight wobble; the edges should be set and barely coloured.
- Blind-bake first"Line a well-buttered pudding-dish with a rich puff-paste and bake" means blind-baking the shell before it is filled. Line with paper and weights, bake at 400°F until the layers are set and dry, then lower the oven for the filling.
- Pulverized sugarIn this period that means sugar crushed fine from a loaf — the equivalent of today's caster or superfine sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Half a pound is a generous cup.
- Butter quantityOne cup is 8 oz, two American sticks. Have it genuinely soft, not melted, or it will not take air when beaten with the sugar.
- Egg sizePeriod eggs were often smaller than today's large eggs, so six yolks and six whites may give somewhat less volume than six modern large ones. If your eggs are extra-large, five of each may be closer to the intent.
- Folding the whites"Beaten to a froth" is soft peaks, not stiff meringue. Fold them in at the last moment and get the dish into the oven promptly, or the mixture separates into a curd layer with a foam cap.
- Dish and yieldA 9-inch deep pie plate or a shallow 2-quart baking dish suits this quantity. It serves eight, and like most lemon curd bakes it is better cool than hot — the flavour is flat straight from the oven.
- TimingExpect 35 to 45 minutes at 325°F for the filling. If the pastry rim colours too fast, shield it with foil rather than dropping the oven further.
Lemon puddings baked in a paste-lined dish appear widely in English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, with related lemon creams and curd-filled cheesecakes found earlier, under names like lemon cheesecake, lemon cheese and simply lemon pudding — "cheese" here meaning only the thick curd of butter, sugar, eggs and citrus, with no dairy cheese involved. In English usage a pudding need not be boiled or steamed: anything baked in a pudding-dish qualified, which is why an American reader may find the title misleading. The proportions here — a cup of butter and half a pound of sugar against six eggs and one lemon — make a notably rich filling. Its place in this book reflects the compiler's method: a dish a day, each tagged to a country, with England here supplying the sweet, buttery, pastry-based end of the calendar.