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Orange Pudding
Peel and cut five good oranges into thin slices, taking out the seed. Pour over them a coffee-cup of white sugar. Let a pint of milk get boiling hot by setting it in some boiling water. Add yolks of three eggs well beaten, one tablespoonful corn starch, made smooth with a little milk. Stir all the time, and as soon as thickened pour over the fruit. Beat the whites to a stiff froth, adding a tablespoonful of sugar, spread over the top. Set it in the oven a few minutes to harden. Serve either hot or cold.--Mrs. E. P. G. Orange Pudding.
Yolks of 16 eggs. 1 pound powdered sugar. 1 pound butter, creamed. The rinds of two oranges, grated, and the juice of one lemon.--Mrs. Dr. T. W. Orange Pudding.
Take skin of a large orange, boil it soft, pound it, and add the juice of one orange, with the juice of a lemon, ten eggs, one pound butter, one pound sugar; beat to a cream; add glass of wine, brandy, and rose water.--Mrs. J. T. G.
Orange Pudding.
Pare two oranges, beat very fine, and add half a pound of sugar, and half a pound of butter, washed. Beat the yolks of sixteen eggs, and add to them the other ingredients, well mixed and beaten together. Bake in a puff-paste. For eight or ten persons.--Mrs. F.
Orange Pudding.
Put two oranges and two lemons into five quarts of water. Boil them till the rinds are tender, then take them out, slice them thin, and take out the seed. Put a pound of sugar into a pint of water. When it boils, slice into it twelve pippins, sliced and cored. Lay in the lemons and oranges; stew them tender. Cover the dish with puff-paste. Put in the fruit carefully, in alternate layers. Pour over the syrup, put some slips of paste across it, and bake it.--Mrs. E.
Five separate contributions gathered under one heading, and they are not variations on a single dish: the first is a stovetop cornstarch custard poured over sliced oranges, the middle three are rich baked orange curds, and the last is a fruit tart. Read whichever one you mean to make all the way through before starting, since the second gives no method at all.
- Coffee-cup and glassA coffee-cup of this period is usually reckoned at roughly a cup (about 8 fl oz), a teacup rather smaller; the book itself does not define its measures. A "glass of wine" as a measure is commonly taken as about 1/2 cup. Mrs. J. T. G. gives no quantity at all for the brandy and rose water, so add them sparingly.
- Mrs. E. P. G.'s custard is the easy oneA pint of milk, three yolks and a tablespoon of cornstarch is a thin pouring custard. Heating the milk in a bowl set over boiling water is a double boiler, and it gives you a margin against curdling the yolks. Cook until it coats a spoon, then pour it hot over the sugared oranges.
- Browning the meringue"A few minutes to harden" means a hot oven for a short time, watched closely; the book gives no temperature. The whites are only lightly sweetened and will colour fast. Three whites make a modest amount of meringue for a pint of custard, so use a small dish.
- The baked puddings need a temperatureMrs. F.'s pudding is an orange curd baked in puff-paste; Mrs. J. T. G.'s gives neither pastry nor oven direction. A moderate oven (around 350F) until the centre is just set and no longer liquid when the dish is tilted, roughly 35 to 50 minutes depending on depth, suits this sort of mixture; the book itself specifies nothing. Higher heat risks the eggs setting hard at the edges before the middle firms.
- Sixteen yolks and a pound of butterSixteen yolks -- Mrs. F. uses sixteen yolks with half a pound each of sugar and butter; Mrs. Dr. T. W. uses sixteen yolks with a pound of each. Both are period proportions that yield something closer to lemon curd than to custard. Mrs. F. says eight to ten persons, which suggests a shallow tart rather than a deep pudding basin. Mrs. Dr. T. W.'s list gives no instructions at all and is a richer version of the same idea rather than an identical formula.
- Butter, washedWashing butter meant kneading it under cold water to rinse out salt and residual buttermilk. Modern unsalted butter needs none of this; use it straight, softened, and cream it with the sugar as directed.
- PippinsIn Mrs. E.'s tart, pippins are firm tart cooking apples. Any apple that holds its shape when stewed will do; Granny Smith or Bramley are the closest supermarket equivalents. Boiling whole citrus in five quarts of water is simply to soften and de-bitter the rind, and the water is discarded.
- Puff-pasteBought all-butter puff pastry is a fair substitute. For Mrs. F.'s pudding, the one actually baked in paste, blind-baking the case before filling will help keep the wet mixture from leaving the base raw.
Orange pudding in this form belongs to a long line of English baked citrus "puddings" that arrived in Virginia kitchens and stayed put: a great many yolks, an equal weight of butter and sugar, and grated rind, baked in pastry. Eighteenth-century cookbooks print near-identical formulas, and the family is closely related to lemon pudding, transparent pudding and what later Southern books call chess pie. That five women's versions sit side by side here is characteristic of Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), which Marion Cabell Tyree compiled from contributions by Virginia housekeepers rather than writing herself, initials standing in for the whole name. The range within the entry is a useful record of change: the older, spirit-and-rose-water pudding of Mrs. J. T. G. against the cornstarch custard of Mrs. E. P. G., which depends on commercially milled corn starch, a pantry item that became widely available in American kitchens from the 1840s onward.