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Snowball Pudding
Boil one quart of rich milk and then thicken it with a tablespoonful of flour or arrow-root. Beat up the yolks of four eggs with three tablespoonfuls of white sugar. Then pour the milk slowly into the eggs and sugar, stirring all the time. Pour this custard into a pudding dish and brown it slightly. Beat up the whites to a stiff froth, adding four tablespoonfuls of sugar, and flavoring with lemon. Drop it on the custard (when browned) in the form of balls, as large as an egg. Set it back in the stove to brown a little.-Mrs. S. T.
A stirred custard finished under heat with meringue "snowballs" dropped on top. The hinge is heat control: the custard must set without boiling, and the meringue needs a gentle oven, not a fierce one.
- Rich milkNineteenth-century "rich milk" was unhomogenised whole milk, often with cream left in. Use a quart of whole milk, or three cups whole milk plus one cup half-and-half for something closer to the original.
- Arrow-root or flourOne tablespoon of either into a quart is a very light thickening — this sets as a soft pouring custard, not a sliceable pudding. Slake the starch in a few tablespoons of cold milk before adding it to the hot milk, or it will lump.
- Tempering"Pour the milk slowly into the eggs, stirring all the time" is the whole technique. Add the hot milk in a thin stream to the beaten yolks and sugar; dumping it in curdles them into sweet scrambled egg.
- Browning the custardThe recipe says only "brown it slightly" and gives no heat or time. A moderate oven (in modern terms somewhere around 325–350F) until the surface just films and colours; how long will depend on the depth of the dish. The custard should still wobble at the centre; carryover heat finishes it.
- "Set it back in the stove"I.e. return the dish to the oven; on a wood range the cooler part of the oven would have suited. A slow oven, briefly, until the meringue balls are set and faintly tan. A hot oven weeps and collapses them.
- The meringueFour whites with four tablespoons of sugar is a soft meringue by modern standards; beat to firm, glossy peaks before the sugar is fully in and it will hold its shape when spooned into egg-sized mounds. A pinch of cream of tartar helps it stay put.
- Flavoring with lemonThe recipe does not say in what form; extract, lemon-peel essence and grated zest were all in use. Half a teaspoon of extract, or the finely grated zest of one lemon, folded in at the end. Zest gives more flavour but slightly slackens the froth.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. It is meant to be eaten cool but not chilled hard, the same day it is made — the meringue softens and beads overnight.
Snowball pudding belongs to the wide family of "floating island" and "snow" desserts that dominated Anglo-American dessert tables from the eighteenth century onward, all built on the same economy: yolks thicken the custard, whites are whipped and set afloat on top so nothing is wasted. The older versions poached the meringue balls in milk on the stovetop; browning them in the oven, as here, is the later style. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), attributed like much of that book to a contributing housewife identified only by initials, reflects how such collections were assembled — Marion Cabell Tyree gathered receipts from some 250 Virginia women, and the terse, assured phrasing here assumes a cook who already knows what a custard should look like when it is done.