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Victoria Pudding
Serve Strain one quart of stewed apples through a seive, take yolks of six eggs, one ounce of butter, one heaping tablespoonful of flour, sweeten to taste; line the dish with a rich paste, bake half an hour, beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, stir in half a pound of pulverized or granulated sugar, put the frosting on the pudding and return it to the oven long enough to brown.
An apple custard baked in a pastry shell and finished with meringue — essentially an apple version of a lemon meringue pie. The original assumes you already know the oven and the dish size, so a few numbers need supplying.
- The stray first word"Serve" at the head of the recipe appears to be a typesetting stray rather than part of the instructions, which begin at "Strain".
- A quart of stewed applesAbout 4 cups of thick unsweetened apple purée, which takes roughly 3 lb of tart apples stewed down with very little water. If the apples are peeled and cored before stewing, a brief mash may serve in place of the sieve.
- Sweeten to tasteFor 4 cups of tart purée, start at 1/2 cup sugar and taste before the yolks go in. The meringue on top carries a great deal of sugar, so keep the filling on the sharp side.
- Rich pasteA short pastry made with a high proportion of butter, rolled thin. Line a 9-inch deep pie plate or a 9-inch tart tin; a partly blind-baked shell gives a better base under a wet apple filling than raw pastry does.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake the filled shell at 350F for the stated half hour, or until the custard is set at the edges and barely trembling in the centre.
- The meringue is very sweetHalf a pound of sugar to six whites is a little over a cup of granulated, nearer two cups if pulverized, well above the ratio in modern soft meringue. It will be dense and very sweet, and is more liable to weep. Less sugar behaves better and still browns well.
- Browning the top"Long enough to brown" is 12 to 15 minutes at 350F, spreading the meringue right out to the pastry edge so it seals and does not shrink back. A hotter oven browns faster but leaves the interior of the meringue barely warm.
- YieldOne 9-inch pudding, six to eight servings. Best cooled to room temperature before cutting; the custard needs time to firm.
Puddings named for Queen Victoria were common in English and American cookbooks through the nineteenth century, and the name attached itself to a wide range of dishes considered a little rich -- sponge layers with jam, boiled suet puddings, and baked custards like this one. What is described here belongs to the family of "transparent" and fruit-custard puddings baked in a pastry-lined dish, in which the crust is a container as much as a course. The meringue finish, applied after the custard has set and returned to the oven only to colour, was a convenient way of using whites left over from a yolk-heavy filling, and it turns up with lemon and other fruit fillings in books of this period. That the recipe assumes you know what a "rich paste" is and how hot your oven runs is typical of the genre, which was written for cooks already at work rather than for beginners.