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French Pudding
Grate one pint stale bread. Pour over it one quart fresh milk, yolks of four eggs, rind of one lemon and part of juice, one teacup of sugar, piece of butter size of an egg. Mix all well, put in a pudding-dish and bake until it looks like custard. Then set it to cool, after which spread the top with jelly or preserves. Beat the whites of the four eggs to a stiff froth, adding the remaining juice of the lemon and three tablespoonfuls of sugar. Spread this on top the preserves, then put the pudding again in the oven and bake a light brown.--Mrs. C.
A bread-and-custard pudding finished with preserves and meringue — what English books of the same period call Queen of Puddings. The old measures are the only real obstacle.
- A pint of grated breadMeasure by volume, not weight: roughly 2 cups of coarse crumbs grated from stale bread. Grated crumbs from a dry loaf are what the recipe wants; commercial dried breadcrumbs absorb differently and give a pasty result.
- Teacup and butter the size of an eggThe book does not define its teacup; in receipts of this period it is generally reckoned somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup, so figure up to 3/4 cup sugar for the custard. Butter the size of an egg is about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- Soak before bakingThe instruction to "mix all well" understates the hinge. Pour the milk over the crumbs and let them stand 20 to 30 minutes before the eggs go in, or the bread swells in the oven and the custard separates around it.
- Oven and temperatureBake the custard layer at 325-350F, 40 to 50 minutes, until the centre is just set and barely trembles. A quart of milk to four yolks is a loose custard; overbaking curdles it and weeps liquid under the jelly.
- The lemon rindPare or zest only the yellow he recereceipts frescor often direct steeping the whole rind in the hot milk and lifting it out; that gives cleaner flavour than grated zest left in.
- Cooling and the jellyCool the pudding fully, as written. Spread the preserves on a warm custard and it slides; on a cool one it stays put and the meringue has something to grip.
- The meringueFour whites with 3 tablespoons sugar is a soft meringue by modern standards. Beat to stiff peaks, add the sugar gradually, and add the lemon juice last. Return to a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes to set it through and colour it lightly — a quick blast of high heat browns the surface but leaves the inside raw and slack.
- YieldAllow a 3-quart dish; the custard alone comes to nearly two quarts before the preserves and meringue go on. Serves 8. Best the day it is made, since the meringue softens overnight.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, is full of these initialled attributions. The pudding itself is a thrifty English form dressed up: stale bread bound with milk and yolks, then hidden under jam and a meringue built from the whites, so that nothing in the kitchen is wasted and the result still comes to table looking like a company dish. The same construction appears in British books of the period as Queen of Puddings or Manchester pudding, and the label "French" in American cookbooks of the 1870s is often said to have signalled nothing more precise than refinement — a meringue top, a custard base, something considered elegant. Its appeal in a Southern household is easy to see: milk, eggs, bread and preserves were all on hand, and no ice or special mould was needed.