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Jejune Pudding
Take in sugar, butter, and flour, the weight of four eggs with their shells on, beat the butter to a cream, and mix with it the powdered sugar, the thin rind of a fresh lemon finely minced, the eggs thoroughly whisked, and, last of all, the flour; beat all thoroughly until quite light. This pudding may be either baked or boiled. If baked, half fill some small moulds, well buttered, with the mixture, and bake in a quick oven. Turn out before serving. If boiled, pour the mixture into a well-buttered plain round mould, put a buttered paper over the top, tie it in a cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and boil for an hour and a half. A syrup flavoured with lemon, and slightly coloured with cochineal, may be poured into the dish with the pudding. Time, half an hour to bake the pudding. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A pound-cake batter in miniature, weighed against the eggs rather than measured. The method is sound; only the units, the oven and the colouring need translating.
- Weighing by eggFour eggs in their shells run to roughly 8 oz (225 g), so take 8 oz each of sugar, butter and flour. Better still, weigh your own eggs, as the recipe intends: egg size varies, and the proportions are meant to follow the eggs rather than a fixed ounce figure.
- FlourPlain flour, and no raising agent: the lift comes entirely from creaming the butter and whisking the eggs. Fold the flour in with a light hand at the end, despite the instruction to "beat all thoroughly" — overworking it after the flour goes in is what makes this kind of pudding tough.
- Quick ovenA quick oven is usually reckoned at about 400-425F (200-220C). Small half-filled moulds will colour before the stated half hour is up, so check from about 20 minutes, or bake at 400F (200C) and give them the full half hour.
- Boiled versionButter a plain round mould of about 2 pints, leaving headroom, cover with buttered paper and tie in a cloth as directed. Keep the water at a steady boil for the full ninety minutes, topping up with boiling water so the level never drops below halfway up the mould.
- Lemon rind"Thin rind... finely minced" means the yellow zest only, no pith. Rubbing the zest into the sugar before creaming releases more oil than mincing it does.
- CochinealThe pink syrup was coloured with cochineal, which is still sold as carmine or E120 and is an insect-derived dye. Any red food colouring does the same job; the syrup is simply sugar, water and lemon juice.
- Yield and costFive or six servings, as stated. The "probable cost, 1s." is a period price for the ingredients, not a modern guide.
The name is the puzzle here: jejune comes from Latin jejunus, fasting or empty, and by the nineteenth century meant meagre, plain or unsatisfying — an odd label for a pudding built on equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour. The likeliest reading is "plain" in the cook's sense: no dried fruit, no suet, no spice, nothing but the lemon to flavour it. The layout of the entry — the closing note of time, probable cost and number of persons — is that of the large alphabetical cookery dictionaries of the 1870s and after, which collected short entries of exactly this kind; proportions weighed against the eggs rather than given in ounces recur throughout them.