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Steamed Lemon Pudding
8 small slices stale bread Lemon mixture 1 cup milk 3 tablespoons sugar 2 eggs Grated rind 1 lemon 1/8 teaspoon salt Spread bread with lemon mixture, and arrange in buttered pudding mould. Beat eggs slightly, add sugar, salt, and milk; strain, add lemon rind, and pour mixture over bread. Cover, set in pan of hot water, and bake one hour.
Lemon Mixture. Cook three tablespoons lemon juice, grated rind one lemon, and one-fourth cup butter two minutes. Add one cup sugar and three eggs slightly beaten; cook until mixture thickens, cool, and add one tablespoon brandy.
A bread-and-butter custard where the butter is replaced by lemon curd, set in a mould and cooked in a water bath. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, 325-350F, suits a baked custard; the water bath buffers the heat, but anything hotter will curdle the egg mixture at the edges before the centre sets.
- "Steamed" but bakedDespite the title, the method given is a covered mould in a pan of hot water in the oven, which is a bain-marie; the name may be a carry-over from the steamed-pudding family. Keep the water at roughly half the depth of the mould and top it up with boiling water if it drops.
- The lemon mixture is lemon curdCook the juice, rind and butter, then the sugar and beaten eggs, over gentle heat or a double boiler, stirring constantly until it coats a spoon at around 170F. Direct high heat will scramble the eggs, and the recipe's "cook until mixture thickens" is the only guidance you get.
- It makes far more curd than the pudding needsThree eggs, a cup of sugar and a quarter cup of butter yields roughly a pint of curd. Eight slices of bread will take perhaps a third of it; the rest keeps refrigerated for a week.
- The breadStale means dry and firm, not mouldy. A day-old close-crumbed white loaf, cut about half an inch thick, absorbs the custard without collapsing; modern soft sandwich bread turns to paste and is better dried out in a low oven first.
- DonenessOne hour is a fair estimate for a quart mould, but judge by the custard: it should be just set with a slight wobble at the centre, around 170-175F. Overbaking weeps liquid.
- The mouldA pudding mould is a lidded metal basin of about a quart. A buttered pudding basin covered with buttered foil, or a small deep dish, does the same job. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; on eight small slices of bread and a cup of milk it will serve about four to six, warm, with cream or a thin lemon sauce.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives a substantial chapter to hot puddings, which were an everyday finish to a meal in a household that baked or steamed something most days, and which made use of stale bread that no thrifty cook would throw out. This one sits between two English traditions: the queen of puddings and bread-and-butter pudding family, and lemon curd, which appears in British cookery writing as a preserve and tart filling by the middle of the nineteenth century. Farmer's contribution is characteristic of her method rather than her invention -- she puts the curd into standard measures, specifies straining the custard, and adds the brandy at the end, off the heat. The result is a dish that reads as economical (eight slices of stale bread) while quietly using five eggs, a cup of sugar and a quarter cup of butter.