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Dream Pudding
One quart of milk, yolks of four eggs, five tablespoonfuls of cocoanut, one large coffee-cup of cracker crumbs, flavor with lemon or vanilla, bake about one hour, make a frosting of the whites of the four eggs, with granulated or powdered sugar-a few tablespoonfuls will be sufficient, of sugar, then place it in the oven to brown.
A baked cracker custard under a meringue, written for a cook who already knew how custards behave. Two things need saying before you start: the pudding base as printed contains no sugar at all, and the oven is never named.
- The missing sugarSweetening is given only for the meringue. Comparable baked custard puddings of the period are usually sweetened in the base as well, commonly on the order of half a cup of sugar per quart of milk; without it the base tastes flatly of egg and cracker. The omission may be an oversight of the printer or the contributor, or may be intentional, with the frosting carrying all the sweetness.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names no oven. An hour for a quart of custard suggests something in the moderate range, around 325-350F. Much higher and the eggs will curdle and weep before the centre sets.
- A water bathPeriod cooks often set custard dishes in a pan of hot water and it is worth doing here. It keeps the edges from setting into a rubbery ring while the middle is still loose.
- Cracker crumbsThis means plain soda or water crackers, crushed fine, not sweet graham crumbs and not modern salted snack crackers. A "large coffee-cup" is imprecise, somewhere around a cup and possibly up to a cup and a half; err on the smaller side or the pudding turns stodgy.
- CoconutFive tablespoons of "cocoanut" could mean either freshly grated coconut or the dried shredded coconut sold packaged by the later nineteenth century; either was unsweetened. Modern sweetened flake will add sugar the recipe does not account for.
- Knowing when it is doneThe custard is set when a knife slid into the centre comes out clean and the middle barely trembles, around 170-175F. Cracker crumbs disguise the usual visual cues, so test rather than trust the hour.
- The meringueFour whites will take four to six tablespoons of sugar, beaten in gradually to stiff glossy peaks, which matches the recipe's "a few tablespoonfuls." Spread it to the very edge of the dish so it seals. The recipe says only to put it in the oven to brown; a hotter oven, in the region of 400F for a few minutes, browns it faster than leaving it at custard heat.
- YieldA quart of milk fills a two-quart dish and serves six to eight. Best eaten the day it is made; meringue weeps in the refrigerator overnight.
Cracker puddings belong to the thrifty end of the nineteenth-century dessert repertoire, where crushed soda crackers stood in for breadcrumbs, rice or ground almonds to give a milk-and-egg custard body. The same formula appears across American community cookbooks, sometimes under fanciful titles like "Dream Pudding." The coconut is the giveaway as to period: shredded coconut sold dried and packaged became an ordinary grocery item in the later nineteenth century, and cooks put it into everything from cakes to custards for a while afterward. The meringue lid, browned in the fading heat of the oven, was the usual way to use up whites left over from a yolk-thickened custard, so nothing in the recipe goes to waste.