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Steamed Lemon Pudding
8 small slices stale bread Lemon mixture 1 cup milk 3 tablespoons sugar 2 eggs Grated rind 1 lemon 1/8 teaspoon salt Spread bread with lemon mixture, and arrange in buttered pudding mould. Beat eggs slightly, add sugar, salt, and milk; strain, add lemon rind, and pour mixture over bread. Cover, set in pan of hot water, and bake one hour. Lemon Mixture. Cook three tablespoons lemon juice, grated rind one lemon, and one-fourth cup butter two minutes. Add one cup sugar and three eggs slightly beaten; cook until mixture thickens, cool, and add one tablespoon brandy.
A bread-and-custard pudding layered with lemon curd, baked gently in a water bath despite the name. The curd is made first and must be treated as a custard in its own right.
- Steamed, but bakedThe title says steamed; the method sets the covered mould in a pan of hot water and bakes it. Both approaches work, and the covered mould in a water bath gives the same slow, moist heat as a steamer. If you prefer to steam it on the stovetop, keep the water at a bare simmer, topped up, for about the same hour.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was usual. A custard in a water bath wants 325-350F. Higher and the egg curdles at the edges before the centre sets.
- The lemon mixture is lemon curdA double boiler or a bowl over simmering water, stirred constantly, is the safest route; over direct heat the three eggs can scramble if the heat is not kept low. It is done when it coats a spoon thickly, around 170F; it thickens further as it cools.
- Cool the curd before spreadingWarm curd soaks straight into the bread and slumps. Chill it until it is spreadable, like soft butter, then spread the slices as you would for sandwiches.
- Stale bread mattersDay-old bread with a firm crumb absorbs the custard without collapsing. Fresh soft sandwich bread turns to paste. Cut slices about half an inch thick, crusts on or off as you like.
- Total eggsFive eggs in all: three in the curd, two in the milk custard. Worth counting out before you start, since the two lists are easily conflated.
- DonenessThe pudding is set when a knife inserted near the centre comes out clean and the custard barely trembles. An hour is a reasonable estimate for a quart mould; a wider, shallower dish will be done sooner.
- BrandyOne tablespoon stirred into the cooled curd is for flavour, not preservation, and can be left out without affecting the set.
- YieldNo mould size or yield is given. Eight small slices of bread and roughly a cup and a half of custard suit something in the region of a quart mould, serving perhaps six. Turn it out or serve from the mould, with cream or a thin lemon sauce.
Bread puddings of this kind were a standard economical sweet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century kitchen, and cookery schools of the period taught them: stale bread was a resource rather than a waste product, and a household that baked its own loaves would often have some to hand. What lifts this one out of the ordinary is the lemon curd, a mixture of juice, rind, butter, sugar and eggs that English cooks are recorded making by the middle of the nineteenth century as a preserve for tarts and bread and butter. Spreading the curd on the slices before the custard goes over them is a neat piece of construction — it flavours the pudding throughout instead of leaving a sauce on top. The instruction to bake in a covered mould set in hot water, while calling the result steamed, reflects a period when the two methods were often treated as near-interchangeable ways of applying gentle, even, moist heat to an egg mixture.