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Cold Lemon Pudding
1/2 pint (I cup) water 1 tablespoonful arrowroot 1 tablespoonful sugar 2 egg whites Grate the lemon into a fireproof dish, add the water, and bring to boiling point. Mix the arrowroot with the sugar and strained lemon juice, then pour into the boiling water and stir over the fire till thick. Beat up the whites of eggs and stir them in lightly. Serve cold in a dainty casserole. 5 apples
A one-cup arrowroot jelly from the invalid-cookery chapter, and a good example of how thin the line was between nursery food and sickroom food in Edwardian casserole books. Two things about the text need flagging before anything else: the ingredient list is incomplete, and the method leaves the egg whites essentially uncooked.
- Why not as writtenThe beaten whites go into a mixture that has already been thickened and are then left to cool and be served cold. Nothing holds them at a temperature that would reliably deal with Salmonella. Use a current recipe if you want a lemon arrowroot pudding.
- The missing lemonThe ingredient list gives water, arrowroot, sugar and egg whites, but the method calls for grated zest and strained juice. One lemon is implied; the list simply dropped it.
- The stray apples"5 apples" at the end appears to be a fragment of an adjacent recipe's ingredient list. It has nothing to do with this pudding.
- Half a pintIn an English book of this period half a pint is ten fluid ounces, not eight. The parenthetical "I cup" is a rough gloss, and the two are not the same volume.
- Fireproof dishHere it appears to mean a flameproof earthenware or glass vessel able to sit directly over the burner, since the water is boiled and the mixture stirred over the fire in it. Many modern casserole dishes are oven-only and will crack on a hob.
- Arrowroot proportionOne tablespoon of arrowroot to a cup of liquid gives a soft, barely-set jelly rather than a sliceable pudding. Arrowroot also thins if held at a boil or reheated; the original stirs it only until thick.
- YieldA single cup of liquid makes one portion, or two very small ones.
Invalid cookery had its own chapter in many household manuals from the 1860s to the First World War, and arrowroot was among the starches most associated with it: bland, easily digested, and believed gentler on a weak stomach than wheat flour or cornflour. The powder, milled from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea, came largely from St Vincent in the West Indies and was sold by chemists as well as by grocers, which tells you how it was understood. Lemon was the standard flavouring for sickroom jellies and drinks because it was thought to be cooling and refreshing in fever, an idea generally traced back through centuries of humoral medicine rather than to any specific authority. The book's insistence on serving it "in a dainty casserole" belongs to the same tradition: presentation was held to be part of the treatment when an invalid's appetite had to be coaxed.