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Cracker Pudding
A cup of milk, one tablespoon of cracker crumbs, yolk of one egg. Bake and make a meringue of the white and a generous tablespoon of sugar. Flavor with vanilla and serve with sweetened milk.
A single-serving baked custard thickened with cracker crumbs rather than more egg — the whole of it a sickroom dish, which explains the small quantities and the near-absence of sugar in the base. The original gives no oven temperature, no time and no vessel, so the working details below are the ones that matter.
- CrackersNineteenth-century "crackers" here means a plain unsweetened soda or water cracker, roughly what a saltine is now. Crush them fine; a coarse crumb will stay gritty in so short a bake. If using salted crackers, that is the only salt the dish gets.
- Oven and vesselBake in a single small cup or ramekin set in a pan of hot water; around 325F suits a custard this size. The original specifies no oven heat at all, so this is a modern working figure. Without the water bath a one-cup custard is liable to curdle before the centre sets.
- TimingAbout 25 to 35 minutes, until the custard is set at the edge and still trembling at the centre. It carries on cooking as it stands. A custard baked to firm all the way through has already gone weepy.
- The meringueBeat the white to soft peaks with the tablespoon of sugar, spread it over the baked custard so it touches the rim all round, and return it to the oven until coloured — a few minutes at 350F. Sealing it to the edge is what stops it sliding off and shrinking.
- SweetnessNote that no sugar goes into the custard itself, only into the meringue and the milk poured over. For ordinary table use, a tablespoon of sugar in the milk and egg yolk brings it into line with a plain baked custard.
- Sweetened milkSimply milk with sugar stirred in, served round the pudding as a thin sauce. A little vanilla in the milk as well as the custard does no harm.
- YieldOne portion. The proportions scale directly — a cup of milk and one yolk per person, with a tablespoon of crumbs each — but a larger dish needs longer in the water bath.
"Invalid cookery" was a standard department in American and British household manuals well into the twentieth century, when convalescence happened at home and the cook, not a hospital kitchen, was responsible for feeding the sick. The rules of the genre were consistent: small quantities, bland flavours, soft textures, and nourishment concentrated into an easily swallowed form — milk, eggs and something starchy to bind. A dish of this kind would sit comfortably in such a section, though nothing in the recipe as printed says so. Cracker crumbs did the work that flour or breadcrumbs would elsewhere, and had the advantage of being always in the house. The meringue lid is the one flourish, and it is a practical one as much as a decorative: it uses up the white that would otherwise be wasted from a single-yolk custard.