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Cracker Pudding
Put into a deep dish six or eight large soda crackers. Add a large lump of butter and a teacup of sugar. Grate the rind of two lemons and squeeze the juice over the crackers. Then pour boiling water all over them, and allow them to stand till they have absorbed it and become soft. Beat the yolks and whites of three eggs separately. Stir them gently into the crackers. Butter a deep dish and pour in the mixture, baking it a nice brown. If not sweet enough, add sugar to the eggs before mixing them.--Mrs. M. C. C.
A thrift pudding built on cracker crumbs rather than bread, with no oven temperature and no baking time given. The two things to settle before you start are how much water the crackers will take and how hot the oven should be.
- Soda crackersClose to what we now call saltines, though the nineteenth-century cracker was often larger than a modern one. Reckon on about 3 ounces of modern saltines in place of the six or eight called for. Break them up before soaking.
- A teacup of sugarA teacup in American cookbooks of this period is generally taken as about three-quarters of a cup, though usage varies and some writers meant a full cup. Start with three-quarters and taste the soaked crackers, which is exactly what the closing line of the recipe invites.
- A large lump of butterTwo to three tablespoons. It is meant to melt into the crackers when the boiling water goes over them, so cut it up rather than dropping in a single piece.
- The waterPour just enough boiling water to cover and add it in stages, judging by how much the crackers actually take up. They should end up soft and slack, not swimming; a soupy base will not set with only three eggs.
- Zest before you juiceGrate the rind from the whole lemons first, then halve and squeeze. Two lemons is a lot of acid for this quantity, and the pudding is sharp by design.
- Beaten whitesFold the whites in last and stop as soon as they disappear. The instruction to "stir them gently" is the only thing keeping this from being dense; the beaten whites are the whole of the lift.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the top is browned and the centre no longer trembles as a liquid. A buttered 1 1/2-quart dish is the right size.
- YieldFour to six servings. Good warm rather than hot, and it firms considerably as it cools.
Cracker puddings belong to the same family as bread pudding and the various "mock" desserts that ran through nineteenth-century American cookery: a way of turning a cheap, shelf-stable starch into a company dish with eggs, sugar and citrus. Commercially baked soda crackers were widely available by the mid-1800s and kept far better than bread, which made them a staple of pantries and, inevitably, of puddings. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and generally dated to the late 1870s, was assembled from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one arrives signed "Mrs. M. C. C." rather than in the anonymous voice of a single author. The heavy hand with lemon rind and juice is one impression a reader takes from the book, where lemon often seems the standard way to make a plain baked pudding taste like something deliberate.