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Arrow-Root Pudding
Boil a quart of milk and make it into a thick batter with arrow-root. Add the yolks of six eggs, half a pound of sugar, one-quarter of a pound of butter, half a nutmeg, and a little grated lemon peel. Bake it nicely in a pastry. When done, stick slips of citron all over the top, and pour over it the whites of the six eggs, beaten stiff, sweetened with three or four tablespoonfuls of sugar, and flavored to the taste.-Mrs. S. T.
A baked arrowroot custard in a pastry shell, finished with meringue — closer to a lemon meringue pie than to a modern steamed pudding. The recipe assumes you know how much starch a quart of milk will take, so that is the first thing to settle.
- How much arrowrootThe original gives no quantity, only "a thick batter." For a quart of milk, 5 to 6 tablespoons of arrowroot slaked in a little cold milk will set a sliceable custard; less gives a soft spoonable filling. Add it as a slurry to the boiling milk and it thickens almost at once.
- Do not boil the arrowroot hardThis is the hinge. Arrowroot reaches full thickness just below the boil and thins again if held at a rolling boil or stirred vigorously afterward. Take the pan off the heat as soon as the batter turns glossy and thick.
- Adding the yolksBeat the yolks with the sugar and temper in a ladleful of the hot arrowroot batter before combining, or the six yolks will scramble in the pan. Butter goes in last, off the heat.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of sugar is about one and an eighth cups; a quarter pound of butter is 8 tablespoons, one standard stick. Half a nutmeg grates out to roughly a rounded teaspoon, which is assertive by modern taste — a half teaspoon is plenty.
- "Bake it nicely in a pastry"This means a pastry-lined dish or deep pie plate, not a pastry lid. Blind-bake the shell first; the filling is already thickened and will not dry a raw crust out in time.
- OvenBake at 350F until the center is just set and barely trembles, about 30 to 40 minutes for a deep 9-inch shell. Then put the meringue on and return it for 12 to 15 minutes to color, or run it under a broiler briefly if the custard is already firm.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in strips or diced with holiday baking supplies. It is milder and less aromatic than candied orange; candied lemon peel is the nearest substitute if citron is unavailable.
- MeringueSix whites with only three or four tablespoons of sugar makes a soft, lean French meringue that weeps if it stands. Beat to stiff peaks, spread so it seals to the crust edge all around, and serve the same day.
- YieldEnough for one deep 9-inch pie, 8 servings. Best at room temperature; refrigerate leftovers, though the meringue will slump.
Arrowroot is the starch of Maranta arundinacea, a West Indian rhizome, and in the nineteenth century the Bermuda-grown grade was the expensive one, sold by the pound in apothecaries as much as in groceries. It had a double reputation: as the most delicate of thickeners, giving a clearer, cleaner-tasting set than wheat flour or cornstarch, and as the standard food for invalids and infants, boiled thin with milk and a little wine. A recipe like this one takes the sickroom staple and dresses it for company — a quart of milk enriched with six yolks, half a pound of sugar, nutmeg, lemon peel, candied citron and a meringue crown. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1879, is built from contributions signed with initials like this one, and its puddings show the postwar Virginia household using an imported luxury starch to make something showy out of what is essentially milk and eggs.