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Lemon Pudding (Two lemons one pound)
Two lemons, one pound granulated sugar, three ounces of butter, one pint milk, eight eggs; mix butter and sugar thoroughly together, beat eggs very light, grate the rind of one lemon, and the juice of two, which must be added the last thing; a little salt, bake about three quarters of an hour in a moderate oven. No sauce.
A baked lemon custard in the English pudding tradition, rich with eggs and very sweet by modern standards. The one thing to get right is the order of operations: acid goes in at the very end.
- Juice last, and mean itLemon juice added to the milk-and-egg mixture early, or stirred in while anything is warm, will curdle it. Have the batter fully assembled and the dish ready, then fold in the juice of two lemons and get it into the oven immediately.
- Weights into cupsOne pound granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. Three ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons. One pint of milk is 2 cups. Period eggs varied and were often smaller than today's; eight modern large eggs, roughly 400 g out of shell, is a reasonable working equivalent.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read today as about 350F, though the recipe gives no temperature. At 45 minutes a pudding this size will be set at the edges and barely trembling in the centre; an instant-read thermometer in the middle should show 170-175F.
- Creaming cold butter into that much sugarSix tablespoons of butter will not cream smoothly into a pound of sugar. Have the butter properly soft, work it to a paste with the sugar, then loosen it with the beaten eggs before adding the milk.
- Vessel and water bathUse a 2-quart baking dish. The original gives no bain-marie, but setting the dish in a pan of hot water gives a smoother, less grainy custard and guards against the edges overcooking while the centre is still loose.
- ZestGrate only the yellow of one lemon and avoid the white pith, which is bitter. Rubbing the zest into the sugar before creaming draws out more of the oil than adding it to the finished batter.
- Yield and servingServes eight generously. "No sauce" is an instruction, not an omission: the pudding is sweet and acidic enough to stand alone, warm or at room temperature.
- On the sweetnessA pound of sugar to a pint of milk is very sweet even for a lemon dessert. Cutting to 1 1/2 cups gives a pudding closer to modern taste, though it will set slightly firmer, as sugar softens an egg custard.
The parenthetical in the title distinguishes this from other lemon puddings; nineteenth-century American community and household cookbooks often carried several dishes of the same name differing only in their proportions. The dish itself descends from the English baked pudding, a family of egg-thickened sweets that once meant boiled suet mixtures and by the 1800s more often meant a custard set in a dish, sometimes over pastry, sometimes not. Lemons became more widely available in American cities over the course of the century through Mediterranean and later domestic citrus trade. The flat closing note, "No sauce," heads off a cook who might otherwise supply one, since many puddings in these books were served with a sauce.