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Queen of Puddings
1 quart milk 1 pint bread crumbs 1 cup sugar 4 eggs Juice and rind of 1 lemon 1 teaspoon butter Marmalade or preserves Soak the bread crumbs in the milk for half an hour; add the sugar, the beaten yolks, the lemon and the butter melted. Bake in a buttered pudding dish about three-quarters of an hour or until the pudding shrinks away from the sides of the dish; spread with marmalade or preserves; cover with a meringue made from the whites of eggs and four extra tablespoons of granulated sugar; brown quickly in the oven and set aside to cool. Serve with cream.
A baked bread-and-custard pudding in three layers. The one thing that decides whether it succeeds is oven heat: this is a custard, and it wants gentle, steady warmth until just set.
- Oven temperatureBake the custard base at 325–350F. Higher heat curdles the egg and milk into a weeping, grainy layer before the centre firms. The later instruction to "brown quickly" means a hot oven, 400–425F, for the meringue only — five to eight minutes, watched.
- The doneness cue"Shrinks away from the sides" is a reliable sign, but a thermometer is faster: the centre should read about 170-175F, with a slight wobble. Three-quarters of an hour suits a shallow dish; a deeper one will take longer.
- Bread crumbsA pint is 2 cups, and these are soft fresh crumbs torn or grated from day-old white bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold for coating. Dry packaged crumbs absorb far more milk and give a heavy, pasty pudding.
- Lemon rindZest only, no white pith, and grate it directly into the sugar so the oils are released. Older cooks often pared the rind in strips and steeped it in the hot milk, which is worth doing if you would rather not have flecks in the custard.
- The meringueFour tablespoons of sugar to four whites is a soft, old-fashioned meringue that browns fast and weeps as it stands. Two tablespoons of sugar per white gives a more stable topping. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which stops it shrinking inward.
- Spreading the preservesWarm the marmalade slightly and spread it on the hot custard, gently, with an offset spatula. Cold, stiff preserve drags the set surface open and the jam sinks into the crack.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk and four eggs makes about eight servings. "Set aside to cool" is meant literally -- this is served warm or at room temperature, never fridge-cold, with plain pouring cream.
Queen of Puddings is an English nursery and household dish, generally traced to the Victorian habit of turning stale bread and leftover jam into something worth putting on a table; earlier versions appear under names like bread-and-butter custard or Manchester pudding, and the grander title seems to have attached itself once the meringue cap became standard. Its logic is thrift dressed up: crumbs and milk make the body, the yolks enrich it, and the whites that would otherwise be wasted are whipped into the topping, so nothing from the four eggs is left over. Its inclusion in an American loose-leaf cookbook of the early twentieth century shows the dish circulating in American household cookery of the period -- economical, egg-based, and easily scaled for a family.