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Virginia Pudding
Scald one quart of milk. Pour it on three tablespoonfuls of sifted flour. Add the yolks of five eggs, the whites of two, and the grated rind of one lemon. Bake twenty minutes.
Sauce.--The whites of three eggs, beaten to a stiff froth, a full cup of sugar, then a wine-glass of wine and the juice of a lemon. Pour over the pudding just as you send it to the table.--Miss E.S.
A baked lemon custard thickened with a little flour, sweetened entirely by the foam poured over it at the table. Two things the original omits: any sugar in the pudding itself, and any oven temperature.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, as was normal in 1878. Treat it as a moderate oven, 350F, in a water bath if you want an even set.
- Twenty minutes is shortA quart of milk with only five yolks and two whites will not set in twenty minutes at 350F unless it is spread thin. In a shallow 2-quart dish expect 35 to 45 minutes, until the centre is just barely trembling; in anything deeper, longer still.
- Scalding onto flourPouring a quart of hot milk straight onto dry flour makes lumps. Slake the flour with a few spoonfuls of cold milk first, then add the scalded milk in a stream, whisking. Let the mixture cool below 140F before the yolks go in or they will curdle.
- Wine-glassA wine-glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup, though the book does not define it here. Sherry, Madeira or any sweet fortified wine suits the sauce.
- The sauce is rawThree egg whites beaten with a cup of sugar and wine is an uncooked meringue foam. It gets no heat beyond contact with the hot pudding. Use pasteurized whites if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- Egg economyThe pudding takes five yolks and two whites; the sauce takes three whites. Five eggs cover the whole dish with nothing left over, which is why the counts read the way they do.
- SweeteningAs written the custard is unsweetened and depends on the sauce. If you would rather not serve the raw foam, add 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar to the custard and it stands on its own with the lemon rind.
- Yield and servingSix servings. The sauce must go on at the last moment, as directed: it weeps within a few minutes of meeting the hot surface.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is a collection of contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many of its recipes end in a name or a set of initials such as "Miss E.S." A recipe titled simply "Virginia Pudding" tells you less about a fixed regional dish than about the book's habit of stamping the state's name on a household favourite; the pudding itself belongs to the large nineteenth-century family of baked batter and custard puddings, flour-thickened milk enriched with eggs and flavoured with grated lemon rind. The wine-and-egg-white foam poured over it at table is a period sauce type, close to what other books of the era call a froth, a fluff, or simply "wine sauce," and the fortified wine in it points to the Madeira and sherry that remained standard sweet-course flavourings in Southern kitchens long after the Revolution.