Queenie
Make a cold raw custard with 3 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar and a pinch of salt for each pint of milk. Cut thick slices of stale bread and trim to an even size. Spread on a flat pan and baste over them as much of the raw custard as they will soak up. When perfectly soft all through beat I spoonful of butter in the fryingpan and in it fry as many slices at a time as can be accommodated with crowding. Brown quickly, turn and brown the other side. When done pile very evenly on a buttered dish, spreading each slice with a thick layer of marmalade. When all are done cover top and sides with a thick layer of meringue. Sprinkle liberally with powdered sugar and place in a moderate oven until lightly colored.
A fried-bread dessert built on the same logic as Queen of Puddings: soaked bread, a jam layer, meringue over the top. The original is written for a cook who already knows the drill, so a few numbers are missing.
- The soak is the hingeThe bread must be saturated all the way through before it hits the pan, not merely dipped. Stale, close-grained bread cut about 3/4 inch thick will take custard without collapsing; fresh sandwich bread turns to paste.
- Custard ratioThree eggs, 2 tablespoons sugar and a pinch of salt per pint (2 cups) of milk. A pint of custard soaks roughly six to eight thick slices, which serves four.
- "With crowding" is a misprint"With crowding" is almost certainly a misprint -- Read it as without crowding. Slices set close together steam rather than brown, and soaked bread that steams falls apart when turned.
- More butter than one spoonfulOne tablespoon will brown the first batch and no more. Wipe the pan and add fresh butter between batches, or the milk solids left behind will burn and blacken the later slices.
- Meringue is not accounted forThe custard uses whole eggs, so the recipe assumes you have whites elsewhere. Allow 3 whites and about 6 tablespoons of sugar to cover a dish this size.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period "powdered" usually means finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's caster sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Either will colour under heat; caster gives a cleaner gloss.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350F (period 'moderate' is generally given as somewhere between 325F and 375F). The dish only stays in long enough for the meringue to take colour, five to eight minutes. The fried slices are already cooked and will toughen if left.
- MarmaladeBitter Seville orange marmalade is the most likely reading, and its edge is what keeps the dish from being cloying under sugared meringue. A very sweet jam leaves it flat.
The name points at Queen of Puddings, the English nursery dessert of milk-soaked breadcrumbs spread with jam and crowned with meringue, and this is essentially that pudding rebuilt out of fried bread rather than crumbs. Underneath both sits pain perdu, "lost bread" — the medieval and early modern habit of rescuing stale loaves by soaking them in an egg-and-milk custard and frying them, a dish recorded across Europe under names such as poor knights of Windsor and arme Ritter. The economy of it is plain: the costly elements are the eggs and the spoonful of preserve, and the bulk of the dessert is bread that would otherwise have been thrown out.