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Puff-pastry
Grate the lemon-rinds and squeeze the juice; mix these with the castor sugar, yolks of eggs, cream, and cake-crumbs. Stir all well together in a basin; whip two whites stiff, and mix them lightly to the other ingredients. Line and decorate the edges of a pie-dish with puff-pastry; turn in the pudding, and bake for about twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven.
A lemon custard pudding baked in a pastry-lined dish — closer to a lemon tart with a soufflé lift than to anything called puff-pastry today. The method is complete; the quantities are not, so read the notes before you start.
- The missing ingredient listAs printed here the recipe gives no weights at all, only "the lemon-rinds", "the castor sugar" and so on; the quantities are simply not on this page. Any figures you use are your own reconstruction, not the book's.
- Working proportionsThese are a suggested reconstruction, not the book's figures and not taken from any cited source: 2 lemons, 3 oz caster sugar, 3 egg yolks, a gill (5 fl oz) of cream and 3 oz cake crumbs, with 2 whites whipped in. Treat that as a starting point and expect to adjust.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Twenty-five minutes suits a shallow pie-dish; the centre should be just set with a slight wobble, since the egg will continue to firm as it cools.
- Castor sugarCaster, or superfine, sugar. It dissolves into the yolks and juice without graininess; granulated will work but wants a longer beating.
- Cake-crumbsDry crumbs from a plain sponge or Madeira cake, not fresh sponge and not breadcrumbs. They are the thickener here — they absorb the lemon juice and cream and keep the custard from weeping. Stale plain pound cake, dried in a low oven and rubbed through a sieve, is the nearest modern equivalent.
- Puff-pastryA commercial all-butter block puff is entirely adequate. Line the dish, keep the pastry cold, and build the decorated edge higher than the filling.
- Folding the whites"Mix them lightly" is the hinge. The whipped whites give the pudding its lift; stir them in and you get a dense, damp curd instead. Fold in two additions with a large spoon and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- Lemon and creamThe juice will thicken the cream on contact. That is expected — it is not curdling, and the eggs and crumbs carry it through the oven.
- Yield and servingNo yield can be fixed, since the recipe as printed gives no quantities. Serve hot from the dish; it sinks a little as it cools, so bring it straight to the table.
Baked lemon puddings set with egg and cake or bread crumbs were a fixture of British household cookery from the eighteenth century onward. The crust is the vessel and the decoration, and the confection inside is the point; the heading "Puff-pastry" refers to the case rather than to the dish itself. Caster sugar and imported lemons were both cheap enough by this date to appear without comment, which would not have been true a century earlier.