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Jelly Pudding, Meringue Pudding, Queen of Puddings, Etc
1 pressed in quart of white bread crumbs. 1 quart of milk. 1/4 pound of butter melted. 1/4 pound of sugar. 1 lemon. 5 yolks of eggs. 1 cup of fruit jelly. 5 whites and 4 ounces of sugar for the meringue.
The jelly is to spread on top after the pudding are baked. Mix all the ingredients preceding it together cold--the lemon grated and squeezed. Bake till set in the middle. Take out and spread the jelly over the top. Beat the whites of eggs till they will not fall out of the bowl turned upside down; stir in the sugar--granulated is best--and a few drops of flavoring. Set the puddings back in the oven till the jelly on top is at boiling heat, then spread the meringue over and let them stay with the oven doors wide open to dry-bake and acquire a slight color. It seems impossible to get along very fast, for now there has to be a little talk about meringues. Meringue (marang) paste is the mixture of beaten white of egg and sugar. When we write lemon pie meringue, it means that it is meringued. Meringues take a wide scope. The icing and ornamenting on cakes is strictly meringue paste. Egg kisses, as they are called, are meringues. The differences are only in the proportion of sugar to eggs. Let us call this on puddings and lemon pies soft meringue to distinguish it from frosting. A tray full of saucers of pudding of the preceding sort looks very attractive when success has attended the making. The pudding should be shallow in the pan, and the meringue should be of about equal thickness; should be firm and cut square, only very often it does not do so, but falls after baking till it is nothing but a pitiful scum. Too much baking is generally the reason. Meringue needs only a very slight heat. Another thing that spoils meringue is spreading it on cold jelly or fruit. It never cooks at bottom but dissolves to syrup. Have the puddings or pies baking hot when the meringue touches them and it will not disappoint you. As to getting the whites to beat up light with ease and certainty that can be accomplished by having them cold to begin with, in a cold bowl and beaten in a cool place. Fifteen minutes of hard work may be avoided by taking this precaution, and five minutes' beating will do as well. The next is a fine pudding to make when you have used the last pint of milk obtainable for ice cream; for this needs to be made with water, to be semi-transparent.
A baked bread custard with a jelly layer and a soft meringue lid — the dish usually called Queen of Puddings. The instructions are sound; only the units and oven language need translating.
- The hinge: spread meringue on a hot baseThe text says it twice and it is the whole trick. Return the baked puddings to the oven until the jelly is bubbling, then put the meringue straight onto that heat. Meringue laid on cold jelly never sets underneath and weeps to syrup.
- Crumbs and quantitiesA quart of soft white bread crumbs, pressed into the measure, is roughly 8 ounces — use stale, crustless bread grated or pulsed, not dry packaged crumbs, which will drink the milk and go pasty. A quarter pound of butter is one stick; the quarter pound of sugar in the pudding and the 4 ounces for the meringue are the same weight — a generous half cup of granulated sugar each.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives no figures; bake the custard base in a moderate oven until just set in the centre — around 325-350F, 40-50 minutes for a shallow pan — as it is a custard and will curdle if pushed. For the meringue the author asks for 'a very slight heat' with the oven doors wide open, which points to a cool oven and a slow dry-bake rather than any brisk browning.
- Why meringue collapsesOverbaking, as the author says, but also undissolved sugar. Add the sugar a spoonful at a time to whites already at soft peak and beat until the mixture feels smooth rather than gritty between your fingers.
- Cold whites versus room temperatureThe advice to start with cold whites in a cold bowl is contrary to current practice — room-temperature whites whip faster and to greater volume. What matters far more is that bowl and beaters be free of any fat or trace of yolk.
- The jelly"Fruit jelly" here means a firm, clear preserve — red currant, raspberry or apple all work. Warm and stir it before spreading so it goes on in an even film rather than tearing the set custard.
- LemonGrate the zest before juicing, and add the juice to the cold mixture rather than to hot milk, or the milk will curdle before it reaches the oven.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk and five yolks will fill a shallow 9x13 pan or roughly eight to ten individual dishes; the book gives no yield. The author mentions a tray of saucers approvingly as well as a shallow pan. Serve warm the day they are made, as meringue on custard does not keep overnight.
Queen of Puddings belongs to the long English tradition of using stale bread as the body of a sweet dish — bread pudding, bread-and-butter pudding, whitepot — and the jam-and-meringue version is generally traced to nineteenth-century English domestic cookery, with the grand name apparently attaching to it later than the dish itself. What makes this page interesting is less the recipe than the digression: the author breaks off mid-instruction to explain that meringue is a category, not a single preparation, and that icing, egg kisses and pie topping differ only in the ratio of sugar to white. The aside, and the assumption that the reader is turning out a tray of these at a time and needs to know why the topping sometimes falls to "a pitiful scum", suggest a book aimed at cooks working to order rather than a purely domestic receipt book. The closing line, about a pudding to make when the last pint of milk has gone into the ice cream, points to a kitchen working through its milk as it came in.