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Orange Pudding
2 oranges. 1 pint milk. 1/2 cup sugar. Yolks of 2 eggs 1 tablespoon cornstarch Whites of 2 eggs 2 tablespoons sugar Slice the oranges into a pudding dish. Bring the milk to a boil and pour it on the egg which has been well beaten with the sugar and cornstarch. Boil until the mixture thickens; pour over the oranges; cover with a meringue made of the whites of eggs and the two tablespoons of sugar; brown quickly in the oven.
A loose-leaf page that has lost part of its ingredient list: the milk, the oranges and the sugar for the custard are all called for in the method but not quantified. What follows fills the gaps in proportion and flags what is genuinely unknowable.
- The missing quantitiesThe printed list gives only 2 eggs, 1 tablespoon cornstarch and 2 tablespoons sugar, and the method assigns those 2 tablespoons to the meringue. A custard of 2 yolks and 1 tablespoon cornstarch will give a soft, loose set to about 1 pint (2 cups) of milk, and 3 to 4 oranges fill a dish of that size. The sugar for the custard itself is not quantified; something like 1/4 cup is a common proportion for a pint.
- Temper, do not scrambleThe instruction to pour boiling milk onto the beaten yolks is the hinge. Add it in a thin stream while whisking, then return everything to the pan. Dumping the yolks into hot milk gives you sweet scrambled egg suspended in starch.
- "Boil until the mixture thickens"Cornstarch custards do need to reach a full bubble for a moment or the starch tastes raw and the pudding thins on standing. Stir constantly over medium heat and pull it off within thirty seconds of the first bubbles breaking.
- Preparing the orangesSlice them free of all pith and white membrane, and work over a bowl so the juice goes into the dish. Undrained pools of juice will thin the custard where they meet; blot obvious excess before pouring.
- "Brown quickly in the oven"No temperature is given. The sense is a hot oven, or a broiler watched without leaving, for the few minutes it takes to colour the surface; the aim is colour on the meringue rather than further cooking of the custard beneath.
- Meringue proportionTwo tablespoons of sugar to two whites is a lean meringue by modern standards and will weep readily. Beat the whites to soft peaks first, add the sugar a spoonful at a time, and beat to a stiff, glossy peak; seal the meringue right out to the rim of the dish.
- YieldMade at the proportions above, this serves four in a 1-quart dish. It is best within a few hours of assembly and does not hold overnight.
Orange pudding of this kind is often said to descend from the English "orange fool" and the trifle-like layered puddings of the eighteenth century, though the lineage is more traditional than documented; the cornstarch is what dates it. Corn starch became a cheap pantry staple in American kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period are full of thickened milk puddings that would once have relied on eggs alone or on arrowroot. The meringue cap on a custard poured over fruit is the same architecture as lemon meringue pie without the crust, and appears under a dozen names in the community and instructional cookbooks of the era. That fresh oranges could be assumed available to a general readership is itself a marker of the period: rail shipment of Florida and California citrus expanded through the later nineteenth century, though availability was far from uniform.