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Queen of Puddings
Take slices of sponge cake and spread with preserves or jelly. Place them in deep dish. Make a custard with one quart of milk and yolks of four eggs. Sweeten and season to the taste and pour over the cake. Beat the whites stiff, adding five or six spoonfuls of sugar and seasoning with lemon. Spread this over the top of the pudding and bake a very light brown.--Mrs. M.D. Queen of Puddings. 1 pint bread crumbs. 1 quart milk. 1 1/2 cupful of sugar. Yolks of 4 eggs, well beaten. 1 teacup of butter, well creamed. Grated rind of one lemon. Bake until done, but not watery. Whip the whites of the four eggs (above mentioned) very stiff and beat into a teacup of sugar, into which has been strained the juice of the lemon aforesaid. Spread over the top of the pudding, after it has slightly cooked, a layer of jelly or sweetmeats. Then pour over it the dressing of eggs, sugar, and lemon, and set in the oven to brown.--Mrs.B.J.B.
Queen of Puddings. 1 1/2 cupful white sugar. 2 cupfuls fine dry bread crumbs. Yolks of 5 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of butter, flavored to taste. 1 quart fresh, rich milk. 1/2 cup jelly or jam.
Rub the butter into a cupful of the sugar, and cream these together, with the yolks beaten very light. The bread crumbs soaked in the milk come next, then the seasoning. Bake this in a large butter dish, but two-thirds full, till the custard is "set". Spread over the top of this a layer of jam or jelly and cover this with a meringue made of the whipped whites and the half cupful of sugar. Bake till the meringue begins to color.--Mrs.D.C.K. Queen of Puddings.
Saturate the crumbs of a loaf of bread with a quart of rich milk. Add to this the yolks of six eggs, two tablespoonfuls of butter, three-quarters pound of sugar. Beat well together, season to taste, and when well stirred, put it on to bake. When nearly done, spread over it a layer of fruit jam or jelly and whites of the eggs well beaten. Sift sugar on top and bake.--Mrs.J.V.G. Meringue Pudding or Queen of Puddings.
Fill a baking dish within one and half inch of the top with slices of sponge cake, buttered slightly on both sides, scattering between the slices, seeded raisins (about half a pound). Over this pour a custard made of a quart of milk, the yolks of eight eggs, sweetened to the taste. As soon as it has baked a light brown, make an icing of the eight whites and put it on top. Set again in the oven to brown a little. Eat with sauce of butter and sugar.--Mrs. R.P.
Five contributors' versions of the same pudding, none of them giving an oven temperature or a time. The bones are constant: a baked custard thickened with bread crumbs or sponge cake, a layer of jam, a meringue browned on top.
- Oven temperatureBake the custard base at 325-350F until just set, roughly 45 minutes to an hour for a quart of milk in a deep dish. Return it with the meringue at 350F for 12-15 minutes, or run it briefly under a broiler if you want colour without cooking the custard further.
- "Bake until done, but not watery"This is the hinge. An egg custard that goes past about 175-180F at the centre curdles and weeps, and no amount of meringue hides it. Pull it when the middle still trembles; a water bath makes this much easier to judge.
- Teacup and teaspoon measuresTeacup measures -- A nineteenth-century teacup is roughly 3/4 cup, not a modern mug. Mrs. B.J.B.'s "teacup of butter" is therefore about 6 oz for a quart of milk, which is extremely rich even by the standards of the other four versions; a tablespoon or two, as Mrs. D.C.K. and Mrs. J.V.G. give, is more typical.
- Bread crumbs"Fine dry bread crumbs" here means stale white bread grated or rubbed through a sieve, not the sandy commercial crumb sold for coating. Torn soft crumb from a day-old loaf soaked in the milk gives the right texture. A pint of crumbs runs anywhere from about 4 oz to 8 oz depending on how dry and how finely crumbed.
- Sugar quantitiesMrs. J.V.G.'s three-quarters pound is about 1 3/4 cups, a little more than the 1 1/2 cupfuls the others give. Modern palates generally find the base sweet enough at 1/2 to 3/4 cup, since jam and meringue both follow.
- MeringueSugar beaten into the whites at 1/4 cup per white gives a stable meringue; add it gradually once the whites hold soft peaks. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which stops it shrinking away as it bakes.
- Jam layerWarm the preserves slightly before spreading so they do not tear the set custard. Firm jellies (currant, quince) hold their line better than loose jams.
- YieldAny of these, built on a quart of milk in a two-quart dish, serves six to eight. Serve warm rather than hot; the meringue weeps as it stands, so it does not keep well overnight.
Queen of puddings is the standard nineteenth-century way of using up stale bread. The name is British and appears in English cookery writing through the middle of the century, and it is often said to derive from an older "queen's pudding" of bread crumbs and custard, with the meringue crown a later refinement. That Housekeeping in Old Virginia prints five versions side by side, each credited to a different contributor by initials, shows how the book was assembled: Marion Cabell Tyree gathered recipes from some 250 Virginia housekeepers and let their variations stand rather than reconciling them. The differences are instructive in themselves. Two of the five build on sliced sponge cake instead of crumbs, one adds half a pound of raisins, and the amount of butter ranges from a tablespoon to most of a cup, which tells you these were kitchen habits written down rather than tested formulas.