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Mountain-Dew Pudding
6 rolled soda crackers Yolks of 4 eggs 1 tablespoon butter 1 quart milk 1/2 cup sugar Whites of 4 eggs 4 tablespoons sugar Beat the yolks of the eggs and mix thoroughly with the crackers and butter; stir in gradually the milk and sugar; pour into a buttered pudding dish and bake for half an hour. Make a meringue of the whites of eggs and the four tablespoons of sugar; spread this over the top; brown and serve when cool.
A cracker custard in the mould of a bread pudding, thickened with soda crackers rather than flour or crumbs. The whole thing hinges on baking the custard gently enough that it sets rather than curdles.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 325F, and treat the half hour as a minimum: a quart of milk with only four yolks sets slowly, and it will likely want 45 to 60 minutes until the centre is just barely wobbly.
- Soda crackersThese are plain saltines, unsalted or lightly salted, not sweet crackers. Period soda crackers ran larger than modern saltines, so six rolled fine may give anywhere from a few tablespoons to half a cup of crumbs; the pudding is meant to be loose and custardy, not dense.
- CurdlingA quart of milk baked in a bare dish at high heat will break into grainy curds and whey. Set the pudding dish in a pan of hot water, or keep the oven low and check often.
- MeringueFour whites to four tablespoons sugar is a soft meringue by modern standards. Beat to firm peaks, spread to the edges of the dish so it seals against the custard, and brown at 350F for about 12 minutes, or a few minutes at 425F if you want colour fast.
- Cooling"Serve when cool" is deliberate — the custard firms as it drops in temperature. A warm slice will slump on the plate. Room temperature is right; refrigerating overnight makes the meringue weep.
- Butter and dishOne tablespoon of butter is the only added fat, the rest coming from the milk and yolks. Use a 1 1/2 to 2 quart baking dish, buttered well, and expect about six servings.
The name is decoration rather than description: "mountain dew" was long-standing slang for illicitly distilled spirits -- Scottish and Irish in origin and current in America through the nineteenth century -- and there is not a drop of liquor in the pudding. The white peaked meringue may simply have suggested a mountain top. What the recipe really represents is the cracker pudding, a family of dishes that used soda crackers or broken hardtack in place of stale bread, at a period when crackers were commonly sold from the barrel. Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the early twentieth-century era of home-economics publishing.