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Texas Pudding
3 eggs (yolks and whites beaten separately). 3 cupfuls sugar. 1 cupful butter. 1 cupful sweet milk. Two tablespoonfuls of flour. Bake in a crust. This will fill three pie-plates.-Mrs. McN.
A chess-pie style filling of the transparent-pudding family: eggs, sugar, butter, milk and just enough flour to hold it. The original assumes you know how to line a pie-plate and judge a wood-fired oven, so the gaps are worth filling.
- The hinge: bake it low and stop while it wobblesBake at 325-350F until the edges are set and the centre still trembles when the plate is nudged, roughly 35-45 minutes for a shallow plate. Pushed to fully firm in the middle, the custard curdles and weeps; it finishes setting as it cools.
- Scale it down"Three pie-plates" means three shallow plates of the period, thinner and probably smaller than a modern pie. For one pie, use 1 egg, 1 cup sugar, 1/3 cup butter, 1/3 cup milk and 2 teaspoons flour. Each pie serves 6 to 8 — it is very rich.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk also kept in the kitchen. Buttermilk makes a tangier pie of its own kind rather than this one, so substitute only if that is what you are after.
- The butterA cupful is 8 oz / 2 sticks, softened rather than melted. Cream it with the sugar, then beat in the yolks, milk and flour, and fold the whipped whites in last — the whites are what lift this above a plain chess filling.
- "Bake in a crust"An unbaked short pastry shell, filled and baked together. Modern practice favours blind-baking the shell at 400F for 15 minutes first, which keeps the bottom from going soggy under a wet custard.
- Flavouring is left to youReceipts of this type often add grated lemon rind and juice, nutmeg, or a spoonful of brandy or rosewater. Without something, three cups of sugar tastes flatly sweet; the juice of a lemon per pie is a common corrective.
- SweetnessThe sugar-to-egg ratio is high even by chess-pie standards. Cutting the sugar by a quarter should still set, since the eggs do the setting, and will taste more of butter and egg.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from some 250 contributors whose names she often shortened to initials, is full of these one-line puddings passed hand to hand between households. "Texas Pudding" belongs to the broad Southern family of transparent puddings, chess pies and buttermilk pies — sugar, butter and eggs bound with a spoonful or two of flour and baked in pastry — a formula that made a company dessert out of pantry staples and no fresh fruit at all. Names in this tradition attach loosely and travel with people rather than places; a Virginia receipt called Texas Pudding likely came east with a correspondent or a relative rather than out of any Texan kitchen, and the same filling appears elsewhere as chess, Jeff Davis, or simply transparent pie. The technique of beating yolks and whites separately, which Tyree's book calls for constantly, was one common way of lightening a batter, alongside the chemical raising agents already in wide use by 1878.