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Date Meringue Pudding
2 cups cooked cereal 1/2 cup chopped dates 2 cups milk 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix all ingredients except egg whites. Pour into buttered baking dish, bake 1/2 hour; cover with meringue of beaten egg whites and 4 tablespoons powdered sugar and brown in oven.
A thrifty pudding built on leftover breakfast cereal, bound with a plain custard and finished under a meringue. The recipe assumes you know how a baked custard behaves, and gives no temperature at all.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Bake the custard base in a moderate oven, 350F, for the half hour given; a hotter oven will curdle the milk and eggs into a weeping, grainy pudding.
- "Cooked cereal"This means leftover hot breakfast porridge rolled oats, farina, cream of wheat or hominy grits. Oatmeal gives the most texture, farina the smoothest set. It should be cool and thick, not hot, before the milk and eggs go in.
- Separate the eggs firstThe instruction to mix all ingredients "except egg whites" means the two yolks go into the custard and the whites are reserved for the meringue. Nothing in the ingredient list flags this.
- The meringueBeat the two whites to soft peaks, then add the 4 tablespoons powdered sugar a spoonful at a time and beat to stiff, glossy peaks. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which stops it shrinking away as it bakes.
- BrowningTen to twelve minutes at 350F sets and colours the meringue through. A blast at 425F browns the top faster but leaves the inside slack and prone to weeping.
- SweetnessA cup of sugar plus the dates is very sweet by current taste. Half a cup in the custard is ample if the dates are moist; keep the meringue's 4 tablespoons, which stabilise the whites and give the top its gloss.
- DatesChop them small and toss with a little of the sugar to keep the pieces from clumping together.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 1 1/2-quart baking dish suits this quantity. It serves six, and is best warm rather than hot, on the day it is made: meringue turns rubbery and beads after a night in the refrigerator.
Puddings like this belong to the long tradition of using up cooked cereal, which in the era of the coal range and the double boiler was made in quantity each morning and rarely finished. Cookbooks of the period routinely offered a second life for the porridge pot: fried into cakes, stirred into bread dough, or as here bound with milk, egg and sugar into a baked custard. Dates were a popular sweetening fruit, cheap and shelf-stable, and they appear in American cake, bread and pudding recipes of the interwar decades far more often than they do today.