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Lemon Meringue Pudding, with Sweet Cream
1 full pressed quart of bread crumbs. 1 quart of water. 6 ounces of finely chopped suet. 8 ounces of sugar. 3 lemons--rinds of all, juice of 2. 8 yolks of eggs. 1/2 teaspoonful of soda.
Grate the rinds of the lemons into the bread crumbs--using a tin grater and scraping the zest from that with a lump of sugar--also mix in the suet. Squeeze the lemon juice into the water, pour it over the bread, add the sugar, eggs beaten, and lastly the soda in a little water. Bake and finish by spreading meringue over the top--made of the whites left over--same as directed for nonpareil pudding preceding. No jelly needed. For an acid pudding like this an extra sweetness and fine appearance may be given by sifting granulated sugar on top of the meringue at the moment before putting it in the oven--makes a glazed crust. The lemon pudding, of course, can be left plain, without meringue. Sweetened cream made hot, but not boiled, is the best sauce.
A baked bread-and-suet pudding sharpened with lemon and finished with meringue. The original assumes a bakeshop oven and a cook who already knows how meringue is handled, so a few numbers need filling in.
- The hinge: add the soda last, then bake at onceThe half teaspoon of soda is there to react with the juice of two lemons, lightening a heavy crumb mixture. Once it is stirred in the batter is already working, so get it into the dish and into the oven without delay.
- A pressed quart of bread crumbsRoughly 4 cups of crumbs pressed firmly into a quart measure; the weight varies a good deal with how dry and how fine they are, so go by volume rather than the scale. Use plain stale white bread, not seasoned commercial crumbs, and let the mixture stand a few minutes so the crumbs drink up the quart of lemon water.
- SuetBeef suet, finely chopped or grated, was the standard shortening for boiled and baked puddings. It is available from butchers but rarely from supermarkets; an equal weight of cold unsalted butter, coarsely grated, gives a comparable result with a softer, less crumbly set.
- Scraping the zest with sugarThe book has you grate the rind and then scrape the zest off the grater with a lump of sugar; on a coarse tin grater a good deal of the zest and its oil clings to the metal. A modern rasp grater releases the zest cleanly, so grate straight into the crumbs.
- Oven and vesselThe recipe says only 'bake' and names no temperature; a moderate oven of about 350F for 45 to 60 minutes, until set and just firm in the centre, suits it. Use a buttered dish of 3 quarts or more, since the batter alone runs to about 2 1/2 quarts. A deep dish takes longer and browns unevenly.
- The meringueEight whites take about 1 cup of sugar, beaten in gradually to stiff, glossy peaks. Spread it over the cooled-slightly pudding, dust with granulated sugar for the glazed crust the recipe describes, and return it to a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes until the peaks colour.
- The sweet cream sauceHeavy cream sweetened to taste and warmed only to steaming, as the recipe directs: hot but not boiled. Boiled cream can catch on the pan and separate; hold it below a simmer and serve it in a pitcher alongside.
- YieldBuilt on a quart of liquid and eight eggs, this serves 10 to 12. It cuts cleanly once fully cool and is better the day it is baked, since the crumb base stiffens in the refrigerator.
Puddings of this kind sit at the meeting point of two older traditions: the English suet pudding, in which chopped beef fat and stale bread stand in for pastry, and the American lemon pie, which by the late nineteenth century commonly appeared as a sweet-acid filling under a meringue cap. The recipe's cross-reference to a 'nonpareil pudding preceding' and its assumption of leftover whites suggest a professional rather than a domestic kitchen, though nothing on the page settles who the book was written for. The instruction to scrape the zest off a tin grater with a lump of sugar is a good marker of period equipment, and the closing note that hot sweetened cream is the best sauce reflects an era when a jug of cream, rather than a scoop of ice cream, was a usual accompaniment to a baked pudding.