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Superior Pudding
4 eggs. 1 quart of milk. 1 cup of sugar. 2 tablespoonfuls of flour. Beat the sugar, flour, and yolks of the eggs together, with one cup of the milk, scald the remainder of the milk and put the above in it. Flavor with lemon or vanilla. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, add a little sugar, spread on top of the pudding, and brown slightly.--Mrs. D. C. K.
This is a stirred custard thickened with a little flour, poured into a dish and finished with meringue. The whole thing hinges on heat control: the custard must thicken below a boil, and the meringue only needs colour, not cooking through.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: keep it below a rolling boil -- Scald the milk to about 180F (steaming, small bubbles at the edge), then temper it into the yolk mixture and return it to low heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon. The flour gives some protection, but a hard boil still risks curdling.
- Quantities in modern terms1 quart of milk is 4 cups; whole milk gives the right body. A cup of sugar is 200 g, and beyond the four yolks the only thickener is 2 tablespoons of flour, so expect a soft pouring custard rather than a sliceable pudding.
- "A little sugar" for the whitesReckon 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar per egg white, beaten in gradually once the whites hold soft peaks. Less than that and the meringue weeps; much more and it turns to marshmallow.
- Browning the topThe original says only "brown slightly" and names no heat source. In a modern oven, 425F for 4 to 5 minutes gives colour with a still-soft interior; a longer spell at 350F will set the meringue through, though that goes beyond what the text asks.
- The dish is unstatedNothing in the text says where the pudding goes. Pour the finished custard into a 1.5 to 2 quart baking dish, spread the meringue to touch the rim all round so it does not shrink, and brown it there.
- FlavouringFor lemon, use the grated zest of one lemon steeped in the scalding milk and strained out, rather than juice, which will thin and curdle a dairy custard. Vanilla goes in off the heat, about 2 teaspoons.
- Yield and servingSix to eight servings. Serve warm the day it is made; a meringue held overnight in the refrigerator will bead and slump, though the custard beneath keeps three days.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housewives, which is why this pudding arrives credited to "Mrs. D. C. K." rather than to a professional cook. The dish itself is a boiled custard with a meringue lid, a form that runs through nineteenth-century American cookery under a dozen names and no fixed one, so a contributor was free to call hers simply "superior" and let the title do the advertising. Boiled custard was a Virginia household staple in its own right, ladled into glasses at Christmas and doctored with spirits; here it is thickened slightly with flour so it will hold a topping, and the leftover whites are used up on the surface rather than wasted, a habit visible all over these community cookbooks. The line of descent from custard-plus-meringue puddings like this one to the later Southern banana pudding is often drawn, though the intervening steps are more folk practice than documented record.