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Black Raspberry Pudding
Line a pudding-dish with a sweet biscuit dough and bake till a pale brown, when pour into it the stiff-beaten whites of four eggs, then, slowly, a cup of sugar, and last a quart of berries. Bake in moderate oven till done.
This is a berry meringue baked in a pastry shell rather than a pudding in the boiled-and-steamed sense. The instructions are terse, and the order of assembly is the part that decides whether it sets or slumps.
- The hinge: fold, don't pourBeaten whites, sugar and a quart of berries poured in sequence into a hot shell will collapse. Beat the whites stiff, rain the sugar in while still beating to make a soft meringue, then fold the berries in by hand and spread the mixture into the shell.
- Sweet biscuit doughIn a book of this period this most likely means a sweetened, rich biscuit or shortcake dough -- flour, baking powder, sugar, butter rubbed in, milk to bind -- rolled thin and pressed into the dish. A sweet shortcrust or pate sucree behaves better and is closer to what modern cooks expect.
- Blind-baking the liningThe recipe gives no temperature; "bake till a pale brown" suggests a fairly hot oven, and around 400-425F for about 15 minutes will do it, with the dough docked or weighted so it does not lift. Pale brown, not golden -- it gets a second bake.
- Moderate oven350F. Give it 30 to 40 minutes, until the meringue is set and lightly coloured and the berry juices are bubbling at the edges.
- A quart of berriesAbout 4 cups, roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of black raspberries. Frozen berries work but should be used still frozen and the bake extended, or they will flood the shell.
- Four whites, one cup of sugarThat is a generous meringue ratio -- about 1/4 cup sugar per white. With very ripe berries, 3/4 cup is enough; the fruit is doing some of the sweetening.
- Expect weepingA sugar-heavy meringue baked over juicy fruit will bead and leak a little syrup as it cools. Serve the same day, at room temperature rather than chilled, and do not cover it while warm.
- YieldSuited to about a 9-inch dish, six to eight servings. The yolks are left over; they keep two days covered in the refrigerator and go into custard.
Black raspberries -- Rubus occidentalis, the "blackcap" -- are a North American native, distinct from the European red raspberry and from blackberries, with which they are still confused. They were a significant commercial crop in Ohio, Michigan and western New York around the turn of the twentieth century, sold fresh in season and evaporated or canned for the rest of the year. The construction here, a pre-baked shell filled with fruit bound in stiff whites, belongs to a family of egg-thickened "puddings" that let a cook use a large quantity of soft summer fruit without a stovetop custard or a starch thickener. Recipes of this vintage assume the cook knows what a workable biscuit dough looks like and what a stiff white is, so they say very little -- brevity here is a sign of a familiar dish, not a simple one.