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Prairie Plum Pudding
Stew together a tea-cup raisins and half tea-cup citron; prepare dish with butter, put in layer of sponge-cake (any kind of cake will do, or Boston crackers, sliced and buttered may be used, or even stale Graham bread-crumbs), then a layer of fruit, and so on, with cake or bread for last layer; pour over it custard made of a quart of milk and yolks of four eggs, sweetened to taste; bake until on inserting a knife the milk has become water. Make a frosting of the whites of four eggs and four table-spoons pulverized sugar, spread on pudding, brown in oven, and serve with sauce made of one tea-cup white sugar, two-thirds pint water, one table-spoon butter, one tea-spoon corn-starch mixed smoothly with a little cold milk; let sugar and water boil, add the rest, and allow to boil a few moments, then add the white of one well-beaten egg with one tea-spoon vanilla essence. - Mrs. M. E. Godard.
A bread-and-butter pudding built on cake instead of bread, with a boiled meringue-lightened sauce. Nothing in it is difficult, but the doneness test as written will take you past the point you want.
- The hinge: ignore the knife test"Bake until on inserting a knife the milk has become water" most likely describes a custard taken past setting, to the point where the liquid on the blade runs thin and clear rather than creamy; that is the stage a modern cook works to avoid. Bake at 325F until the custard is just set and barely trembles at the centre, roughly 45 to 60 minutes in a buttered 2-quart dish, and pull it while a knife still comes out with a faint film rather than clear liquid.
- Teacup and pintA nineteenth-century teacup is generally reckoned smaller than a modern measuring cup; it is usually taken as about 3/4 cup, giving roughly 3/4 cup raisins and 6 tablespoons citron. Two-thirds pint of water for the sauce is about 1 1/3 cups.
- "Stew together" the fruitSimmer the raisins and citron in just enough water to cover, 5 to 10 minutes, until plump, then drain well. Wet fruit will thin the custard and sink through the cake.
- CitronCandied citron peel, from the thick-rinded citron fruit (in some American usage a preserving melon was candied under the same name), sold in tubs at holiday time and still stocked by baking suppliers. Candied orange or lemon peel is the closest substitute; do not use the citron of citron-in-syrup preserves without draining and chopping it.
- Boston crackersA large, plain, hard soda cracker of the period. A modern equivalent is a water biscuit or unsalted saltine, sliced is no longer possible, so simply butter them whole and overlap them.
- Custard proportionA quart of milk to four yolks is a loose custard by modern standards, which is why it relies on the cake to absorb it. Sweeten with about 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar, and let the assembled dish stand 15 minutes before baking so the cake drinks up the milk.
- Water bathThe original gives no oven guidance of any kind. In a modern oven, set the dish in a roasting pan with an inch of hot water; it is the simplest insurance against the curdling the recipe seems to treat as the finish line.
- The meringueFour tablespoons of sugar to four whites is a very lean meringue that browns fast and weeps easily. Beat to soft peaks, spread to the very edges of the dish so it seals, and brown at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes.
- The sauceCornstarch needs a genuine boil to lose its raw taste — give it a full minute after it thickens. Beat in the egg white off the heat, along with the vanilla, and serve warm; it will deflate if held long.
- YieldA 2-quart dish serves eight generously.
Puddings like this one are the frugal end of the Victorian dessert table: the point is to use up cake, crackers or stale Graham bread that would otherwise be wasted, dressing them with a custard, a handful of dried fruit and a meringue so the result reads as a company dish. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, which came out of Marysville, Ohio, and is usually associated with the ladies of the First Congregational church, is full of such contributed recipes signed with a name and initials — Mrs. M. E. Godard here — and its instructions assume a cook who already knows what a set custard looks like. The "prairie" in the title is often taken to be doing the same work as "poor man's" or "farmer's" in other names of the period — a plausible reading rather than a documented one: it would signal that the expensive suet-and-brandy English plum pudding has been swapped for what a Midwestern pantry actually held, and note that there are no plums in it at all — "plum" had long since come to mean raisins in English pudding names.