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Transparent Pudding
8 eggs, beaten very light. 1/2 pound of sugar. 1/2 pound of butter. Nutmeg, mace, or any spice for flavoring.
Put it on the fire in a tin pan, stirring constantly till it begins to thicken. When cool, pour it over a rich paste, and bake over a moderate fire. Add citron, if you like.--Mrs. Dr. E.
Transparent Pudding. 1/4 pound of sugar. 1/4 pound of butter. Dessertspoonful of rose water. Stir well till light.
Beat four eggs very light, and add to the other ingredients. Butter the baking-dish, line with stale cake, sliced thin, which you may cover with sweetmeats of any kind. Pour the mixture on, and bake for nearly an hour.--Mrs. I. H.
Transparent Pudding.
Yolks of 10 eggs; whites of 2. 1 pound of sugar. 1/2 pound of butter. Season with nutmeg.
Make pastry, on which put a layer of citron or any other fruit. Pour the mixture over it and bake. Beat the remaining whites to a froth. Add a teacup of powdered sugar, flavor to taste, and pour over the top of the pudding after baking. Then put it again in the stove, a few minutes, to brown.-Mrs. E.
Three versions of the same thing: a sugar-butter-egg custard baked in a pastry shell, ancestor of the Southern chess pie. The first two are essentially a stovetop curd finished in the oven; the third goes into the crust raw.
- The hinge: keep the eggs below a scrambleIn the first version, cooking the eggs, butter and sugar in a "tin pan" over direct heat until it thickens is a curd, and it curdles the moment it approaches a simmer. Use a heavy saucepan over low heat or a bowl over barely simmering water, stir without stopping, and pull it at the point it coats the spoon.
- Weights into cups1/2 lb sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated; 1/2 lb butter is two sticks; 1/4 lb of each is half that. 1 lb of sugar in the third version is a generous 2 1/4 cups, which with only 10 yolks and no flour gives a very sweet, dense filling.
- "A moderate fire" and "a moderate oven""A moderate fire" -- the phrase used for baking here corresponds to roughly 350F. For a custard in pastry, 325-350F is right; the third version's meringue needs only 5-8 minutes at that heat to colour.
- A teacup of sugarA teacup in this period is about 3/4 cup, so the meringue is roughly 3/4 cup powdered sugar beaten into the remaining (eight) whites.
- "A rich paste"A short, butter-rich pastry rolled thin. Blind-bake it before filling; a wet custard poured onto raw pastry and baked at moderate heat leaves the bottom pale and soft.
- Stale cake and sweetmeatsIn the second version, thin slices of plain pound or sponge cake line the dish in place of pastry, and "sweetmeats" here most likely means preserved or candied fruit and jam. Citron is candied citron peel, sold at Christmas; candied orange or lemon peel does the same work.
- Rose waterCommercial rose water today can be considerably more concentrated than the flavouring these receipts assume. Start with half the dessertspoon called for and taste.
- YieldEach version will roughly fill a 9-inch pie shell or a shallow 8-inch baking dish; the richness makes small portions the sensible choice.
"Transparent pudding" is an eighteenth-century English name, appearing in printed cookery books well before this Virginia collection, and it describes the look of the thing: eggs, sugar and butter cooked together without flour set into a glassy, translucent amber filling rather than an opaque starch-thickened one. Recipes of this shape are often said to lie behind what later Southern cooks called chess pie, still built on the same skeleton of butter, sugar and a heavy proportion of yolks, though the line of descent is a family resemblance rather than a documented one. That Housekeeping in Old Virginia prints three of them side by side, each credited to a different contributor by initial, shows something of how the book was assembled: Marion Cabell Tyree gathered manuscript receipts and set the variations out together, so the reader could pick the version that matched her own pantry and the number of eggs she happened to have.