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Queen of Puddings
To a quart of milk, allow a pint of fine bread crumbs, a tablespoon of batter, one cup of sugar and the yolks of four eggs; flavor with the grated rind of a lemon, if liked (or a teaspoon of vanilla extract), and half a teaspoon of salt.
Bake in a moderate oven and spread while hot with a layer of any acid jelly or preserves; strained apple juice is sometimes used. Make a meringue of the whites of the eggs and a spoon of powdered sugar, with or without a little lemon juice, and brown in the oven. be eaten cold without sauce. If meringue is not liked, three eggs, yolks and whites, may be used in the pudding, and jelly spread upon the top. This variation is good hot.
A baked bread-crumb custard with a jam layer and a meringue lid. The recipe assumes you know how a custard behaves, so the instructions are thin where they matter most.
- "A tablespoon of batter"A printer's error for butter. One tablespoon, melted and stirred into the warm milk.
- MeasuresA quart of milk is 4 cups; a pint of crumbs is 2 cups, lightly packed, from stale white bread with crusts removed. Fresh soft bread will pack denser and make the pudding heavy.
- Soak the crumbs firstScald the milk, pour it over the crumbs, butter and sugar, and let it stand 15 minutes before beating in the yolks. Skipping this leaves gritty crumbs suspended in weeping custard.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F. Bake in a buttered dish, ideally set in a pan of hot water, for 45 to 55 minutes -- until the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean. A custard taken past that point curdles and drains liquid under the jam.
- The jelly layer"Any acid jelly" means a tart one: red currant, crab apple, damson, or sharp raspberry. Sweet jam gives you a pudding with no contrast, which is the whole point of the dish. Warm the jelly slightly so it spreads without tearing the surface.
- The meringueOne spoon of powdered sugar for four whites is very lean by modern practice; 2 to 4 tablespoons gives a meringue that holds. Spread it to the very edge of the dish so it seals, and brown at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes rather than blasting it.
- ServingThe garbled line means it should be eaten cold, without sauce. The three-egg variation, with jelly and no meringue, is the one the recipe calls good hot.
- YieldA quart of milk fills a 2-quart dish and serves six to eight.
Queen of puddings belongs to the large family of dishes made to use up stale bread and surplus milk in households that bought both daily. The construction -- custard below, preserve in the middle, meringue on top -- is generally traced to English cookery of the mid-1800s, and the royal name appears to be flattery rather than record; no documented connection to a particular queen survives. The recipe closes with an alternative -- three whole eggs, jelly on top, no meringue -- which it frames as a matter of taste ("if meringue is not liked").