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Six Eggs (Two teaspoonfuls of Vanilla)
Two teaspoonfuls of Vanilla.
Cook the cocoanut in the milk; cream the butter and sugar together, beat up the yolks of eggs, and add to the butter and sugar. When the milk is off the boil, stir the eggs, cream, butter, and sugar, the cake-crumbs and vanilla, to it; also add three whites of eggs whipped to a stiff froth. Put this into a pie-dish, and bake for half an hour.
Q Whip the other three whites of eggs to a stiff froth with three tablespoonfuls of castor sugar and a little vanilla. Just before the pudding is done, spread this meringue on the top of it, and brown it lightly in the oven.
This is a crumb-and-custard pudding finished with meringue, in the family of Queen of Puddings. The page as printed carries only the tail of its ingredient list, so the proportions have to be reconstructed from the method.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the six eggs and two teaspoonfuls of vanilla survive from the ingredient list; the amounts of coconut, milk, butter, sugar, cake crumbs and the cream named in the method are absent and cannot be recovered from the text. Something on the order of 1 pint milk, 2 oz desiccated coconut, 2 oz butter, 2 oz sugar and 4 oz cake crumbs would give a pudding of this kind, but that is a guess, not the author's figures.
- "When the milk is off the boil"The direction matters: the coconut-infused milk should be taken off the heat and allowed to cool a little before the yolks go in, or the eggs may scramble instead of setting as a custard.
- CocoanutDesiccated (unsweetened, finely shredded) coconut, which is what a British kitchen of this date would have had in a packet. Sweetened flaked coconut will push the pudding noticeably sweeter; reduce the sugar if you use it.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. It matters for the meringue, where granulated sugar dissolves too slowly and weeps.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent. Half an hour suits a shallow buttered pie-dish; the pudding should be just set with a slight wobble at the centre. A deeper dish will want longer.
- The meringueWhip the reserved three whites to stiff peaks with the three tablespoonfuls of caster sugar, spread over the hot pudding so the base of the meringue cooks against it, and return it for 5-8 minutes until faintly coloured. Longer and it will shrink and bead.
- Cake-crumbsDry, plain cake such as stale sponge or Madeira, rubbed through a coarse sieve. Fresh cake gives a pasty texture; breadcrumbs work but give a coarser, more bread-pudding result.
- YieldA pudding of this size serves about six. Best eaten warm, within an hour of baking, while the meringue is still crisp on top.
- The stray QThe lone "Q" mid-paragraph is a printer's or scanner's artefact, not an instruction.
Puddings built on cake or bread crumbs bound with a milk-and-egg custard and capped with meringue were a fixture of late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner tables, the best-known survivor being Queen of Puddings. They belonged to a thrifty logic dressed in fine clothes: stale sponge from an earlier meal became the body of the dish, and the whites left over from an enriched custard became its crown, so nothing was wasted while the thing still arrived at table looking like pastry work. Coconut in this form depended on the desiccated product, which was being imported into Britain in commercial quantities by the closing decades of the nineteenth century and turned what had been a tropical curiosity into a store-cupboard flavouring. Its appearance in a book of "high class" recipes, among hot puddings and souffles, marks the point at which a colonial import had become entirely ordinary in an ambitious private kitchen.