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Orange Cracker Pudding
Two oranges, one and one quarter cups of white sugar, one cup crackers rolled very fine, three eggs, one tablespoonful butter, one quart and half a pint of milk, grate the rind of one orange, and the juice of two. Bake like a custard, and eat cold.
A baked milk custard thickened with cracker crumbs rather than flour, sharpened with orange. The proportions are generous — this fills a large baking dish.
- The hinge: acid and milkOrange juice stirred cold into a raw milk custard will curdle it, and the acid also weakens the set. Combine the juice with the sugar and eggs first, then temper in warmed milk, and pour at once into the dish rather than letting the mixture stand.
- CrackersA period cracker in a recipe like this is most likely a plain soda or butter cracker: unsweetened, lightly salted, closer to a modern saltine than to a graham. Roll or process them to fine crumbs; the recipe says 'rolled very fine', so measure the cup after crushing.
- "One quart and half a pint of milk"Five cups. Whole milk is what the book assumes; anything lower in fat sets weakly against the orange juice.
- "Bake like a custard"The book gives no temperature. Treat it as a slow oven; in a modern oven around 325F, and a water bath will help, though the recipe does not call for one. Bake until the centre is just barely wobbling. The mixture comes to well over two quarts, so use a large dish and expect an hour or more.
- ButterOne tablespoon for five cups of milk does nothing structural; melt it into the warm milk. It is there for richness.
- ZestGrate the rind of only one orange, as written, and take only the coloured outer layer. Zest from both, plus the juice, tips the pudding bitter.
- Yield and servingEight to ten servings. It is meant to be eaten cold, and it firms up considerably in the refrigerator; make it a day ahead.
Cracker puddings belong to a long American habit of using broken crackers where an English cook would have used stale bread or breadcrumbs — soda crackers had the advantage of being reliably dry. Recipes of this type recur in nineteenth-century household books, usually as plain baked custards distinguished only by their flavouring: lemon, rose, nutmeg, or, as here, orange. The oranges are the point of interest. By the 1880s Florida and California fruit is generally said to have been moving by rail in some quantity, and a dessert calling for two whole oranges plausibly shifted from a Christmas indulgence to something a middling household could make on an ordinary week.