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Delicious Lemon Pudding
The juice and grated rind of one lemon, cup sugar, yolks of two eggs, three well rounded table-spoons flour, a pinch of salt, one pint rich milk; mix the flour and part of the milk to a smooth paste, add the juice and rind of lemon, the cup of sugar, yolks well-beaten, the rest of the milk (after having rinsed out the egg with it), line plate with puff-paste one-fourth inch thick, pour in custard, bake in a quick oven until done. Beat whites to a stiff froth, add two table-spoons sugar, spread over the top, return to oven and brown. Serve with very cold cream; or, for a very nice dish, add whipped cream. This is a rich and not an expensive pudding. The recipe makes sufficient for six. -Mrs. Col. Woods, Greensburg, Pa.
A lemon custard baked in pastry under a meringue lid — closer to what we would now call a lemon meringue pie than a pudding. The one thing to get right is the oven: a straight "quick oven" will set the crust but scramble the custard.
- Oven temperatureA "quick oven" is usually reckoned at roughly 400-425F. Start the pastry there for the first 10 minutes to set it, then drop to 325-350F for the custard, which will curdle and weep if held at high heat. The filling is done when the edges are set and the centre still trembles slightly - around 170-175F at the middle.
- MeasurementsOne pint of milk is 2 cups; the cup of sugar is about 200 g. Three "well rounded" tablespoons of flour means heaped rather than levelled - very roughly 35-45 g, enough to keep the custard from breaking.
- "Rich milk"In 1877 this meant unskimmed milk with the cream still in it. Whole milk works; whole milk with 1/4 cup of heavy cream substituted in is closer to the original.
- Puff-paste and the plate"Line plate" means a pie plate, 9 inches or so, rather than a dinner plate. Commercial all-butter puff pastry rolled to 1/4 inch is a fair stand-in, though a plain short crust holds a wet custard better and is less likely to go soggy underneath.
- Rinsing the eggThe instruction to rinse out the egg bowl with the remaining milk recovers what clings to the bowl, and may also help the yolk disperse evenly rather than setting in streaks.
- Acid and milkLemon juice in milk can curdle it; sugar, flour and prompt handling make that less likely, but do not let the mixture stand warm before it goes into the oven. Mix, fill, bake.
- The meringueTwo tablespoons of sugar to two whites is a soft, old-style meringue that browns fast and will not hold long. Spread it so it touches the pastry rim all the way round to stop it shrinking, and brown at 350F for 12–15 minutes rather than blasting it.
- Yield and servingSix, as stated. It is best a few hours after baking, at room temperature or barely cool; the cold cream poured over is the period touch, and whipped cream the "very nice" upgrade.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Minneapolis, 1877) grew out of a church-society compilation, which is why so many entries carry a contributor's name and town u2014 here Mrs. Col. Woods of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, her husband's rank standing in for her own first name, as was usual in such books. The dish sits in the puddings chapter rather than among pies, though the placement tells us little: a soft custard filling baked in a crust and eaten with cream could be called either. Lemons were a bought luxury, generally said to have come up from the Gulf and the Mediterranean, so a recipe that stretches a single lemon across six servings with milk, flour and two eggs genuinely earned its closing boast of being rich but not expensive. The meringue top u2014 whites beaten stiff, sweetened lightly, browned in the falling heat of the oven u2014 was the standard way to use the whites left over from a yolk-thickened custard, and appears in dozens of period recipes for exactly that reason.