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Baked Cabinet Pudding. Meringue
Made with slices of cake and citron in small slips; custard poured over and baked. 2 quart panful of slices of cake. 4 ounces of butter. 1/2 pound of citron cut fine. 2 quarts of milk. 6 eggs. 1 lemon, juice and grated rind. 1/2 cupful of brandy. Meringue for the top.
Butter two pudding pans. Place in a layer of slices of cake. Then sprinkle in citron and bits of butter. Place another layer on that with citron and butter again and there should still be thin slices enough left to cover the citron with. Mix the custard of eggs and milk--no sugar needed--add brandy and lemon juice and rind, pour over the cake in the pans and bake about 20 minutes. When done meringue over in the way already detailed for meringue puddings. When dry slices of cake are used the lemon juice is still more needed to freshen the flavor. The brandy may be omitted without harm.
A cabinet pudding to be served whole can have the citron in patterns on moulds spread with butter. Wrap paper about the outsides to prevent too hard baking of the crust. Bake half an hour. Meringue after turning out and brown the top with a red hot shovel.
Life is full of such compensations as these. Forbidden to use bread any more in our puddings we must manage to get along with cake. But wait, before commencing on the laborious savoy cake puddings there is something else. What a world of Aunt Betsey Trotwoods there used to be eating arrowroot pudding for the sake of poor blacks that never existed with a solicitude like hers for Copperfield's imaginary sister! It is plain it was an advertising scheme. The argument was: there are those poor blacks in the West Indies; you have caused them to be freed from bondage; there is nothing they can do for a living but make arrowroot; if they cannot sell their arrowroot they will die, therefore, to save their lives, you must eat arrowroot pudding. Then arrowroot found a good market and the great majority of all the gold spectacled people in the civilized world were eating all they could. The gold spectacle distinction has to be made because people below that rank could not very well afford it as the poor people who made arrowroot would have died if they had not sold it at a high price. Eating arrowroot pudding is not such a very unpleasant way of being benevolent, but, bless their kind hearts, there came a time when the gold spectacles could not possibly eat any more, and barrels of arrowroot lined with blue paper became uncomfortably numerous in the merchants' warehouses. Then they began mixing it with rice flour and starch and reducing the price, and there never being a very striking difference between starch and arrowroot the cheap article has at last very nearly banished arrowroot altogether, except from the drug stores. All the annexed receipts for starch puddings will do equally well for arrowroot, in case there are any people solicitous for the welfare of arrowroot manufacturers still left in this world.
Boiled Corn Starch Pudding. Corn Starch Minute Pudding. Hasty Pudding. 2 quarts of milk. 1/4 pound of sugar. 1/2 pound of corn starch, good weight. 2 ounces of butter. 2 or 3 yolks of eggs. 1/2 teaspoonful of salt. Vanilla or almond flavoring.
Boil the milk with the sugar in it. Mix the starch with a little milk cold; thin it with some hot milk out of the kettle; pour it quickly into the boiling milk and stir two minutes, or till it is well thickened. Have ready the two yolks beaten with a spoonful of milk, take off the kettle, beat the yolks in, the heat of the starch will cook them, then the butter and flavorings. Turn the pudding out of the kettle it was made in to a bright pan buttered slightly, and keep warm till wanted. Serve with lemon syrup sauce or with hot cream.
There are not many puddings as cheap and simple as that. Nothing else is so quick, and it is never slighted at table. "But why was it, the pudding so nice and rich and firm when first made afterwards turned to liquid in the pan and could not be dished up?"
It was kept too hot and cooked too much.