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Lemon Pudding
8 egg yolks. 1 lb. sugar. 1/4 lb. butter. Juice of 3 lemons. Put all in double boiler. Cook until consistency of cream. Line bowl with lady fingers, pour pudding over them. Make meringue of whites and put over top. Brown a light color in oven. Whipped cream may be used instead. This makes a delicious filling for cake.
This is a lemon curd set into a lady-finger-lined bowl, in the manner of a charlotte. The whole success of it rests on the double boiler.
- The hinge: gentle heatKeep the water below a simmer and stir constantly. Eight yolks with no starch and no whole eggs will curdle if the mixture is pushed much beyond about 175-180F, though the heavy sugar gives some margin; pull it when it coats the spoon and holds a line drawn by a finger.
- Weights to volumes1 lb sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; 1/4 lb butter is 1/2 cup, or one American stick. The juice of 3 lemons will run roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup — measure it rather than counting fruit, since lemons vary widely.
- Add the butter off the heatMrs. Wilson puts everything in together, which works, but the curd is smoother and glossier if the butter is whisked in in pieces once the eggs have thickened.
- Strain itNo cooked yolk mixture comes out entirely free of set threads. Pour it through a sieve before it goes over the lady fingers.
- Lady fingersStore-bought savoiardi are drier and firmer than home-baked lady fingers and will soften nicely under the warm curd. Stand them upright around the sides and line the bottom, seam side in.
- "Brown a light color"The recipe gives no temperature. A hot oven, somewhere around 400-425F, for a few minutes, watched closely, or a broiler at some distance. The aim is color on the peaks only.
- Meringue on cold fillingA brief browning does not cook the whites through. If serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use the whipped cream the recipe offers as an alternative, or a cooked (Italian or seven-minute) meringue.
- YieldRoughly enough to fill a 6-cup bowl and serve about 8, or to fill and top a two-layer cake as the last line suggests. Best eaten within a few days, covered and refrigerated; the lady fingers go very soft.
Lemon curd — sugar, butter, yolks and juice thickened over water — was an English preserve and teatime filling well established by the mid-nineteenth century, and American cookbooks absorbed it as "lemon butter," "lemon cheese" or, as here, a pudding. The bowl lined with lady fingers is the charlotte russe method, a formula that let a household turn a modest quantity of filling into a molded dessert without baking. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal in the First World War years and much of her work is preoccupied with stretching sugar, fat and eggs; a dish calling for eight yolks and a full pound of sugar belongs to the more generous end of her range.