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Lemon Pudding
Stir into yolks of six eggs one cup sugar, half a cup water, and the grated yellow rind and juice of two lemons; soften in warm water six crackers or some slices of cake, lay in bottom of a bakingdish, pour custard over them, bake till firm; beat whites of eggs to a froth, add six table-spoons sugar, and beat well; when custard is done, pour frosting over it, return to the oven and brown. Eat either warm or cold. -Mrs. Walter Mitchell, Gallipolis.
A meringue-topped lemon pudding built on softened crackers rather than bread — essentially a lemon meringue pie with a cracker base instead of pastry. A few things in the original need translating.
- There is no milk in this custardThe base is yolks, sugar, water and lemon juice only, so it sets like a soft curd rather than a dairy custard. Do not add cream to "correct" it; the acidity and the egg yolks are what thicken it.
- What kind of crackersRecipes of this period generally intend plain unsweetened soda or water crackers, closest today to saltines or unsalted water biscuits. Six of them, briefly dipped in warm water until pliable, line the dish; slices of plain cake are the alternative the recipe allows.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; Buckeye Cookery expects the cook to judge the fire. As a modern equivalent, bake at 325-350F until the custard is set at the edges and only barely trembles at the centre — roughly 35 to 45 minutes in a 1 1/2-quart dish.
- Browning the meringueSix tablespoons of sugar to six whites is a light, soft meringue. Return it to a hotter oven, 400-425F, for 5 to 8 minutes so the surface colours before the custard beneath overcooks and weeps.
- The lemon rind"Grated yellow rind" is precisely what it says: take only the coloured zest and stop at the white pith, which is bitter. Two lemons yield roughly two tablespoons of zest and about a quarter to a third of a cup of juice.
- Beat the whites to a froth, then furtherThe period phrase covers everything from foamy to stiff. Take them to soft peaks before adding the sugar, then beat to a glossy stiff peak, or the topping will slump into the hot custard.
- YieldSix eggs and a cup of sugar make enough for six to eight servings. Served warm the pudding is spoonable; chilled it firms up and cuts more cleanly.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) gathered contributions from Ohio housewives, and this one is credited to Mrs. Walter Mitchell of Gallipolis, the Ohio River town founded by French emigrants in 1790. The dish belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century American "cracker puddings" — thrift dishes in which broken crackers or stale cake stood in for a pastry crust or for the bread of an older bread-and-butter pudding. Lemons were widely enough available by the 1870s to appear in cookbooks of this kind, and the combination of a lemon-and-yolk custard under a sugared meringue of the leftover whites is the same logic that produced lemon meringue pie, which spread through American cookbooks over roughly the same decades. The economy is complete: nothing of the six eggs is wasted, and the base costs pennies.