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Queen of Puddings
One pint of bread crumbs; a quart of milk; yolks of two eggs; grated rind of one lemon and butter the size of an egg. Sweeten to taste and bake for about an hour. When cold spread raspberry jam over the top, then beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth; add four teaspoons of powdered sugar and the juice of one lemon. Spread this meringue on top of the jam and place in the oven until a delicate brown.
A Victorian bread-and-butter custard finished with jam and meringue. The recipe assumes the cook knows how a baked custard behaves, so the two things it leaves out — sugar quantity and oven heat — are the two worth pinning down.
- Bake it gentlyThe body here comes mostly from the pint of bread crumbs, with only two yolks in a quart of milk to set the liquid. The recipe gives no oven heat; a moderate one, around 325F, and a water bath if you like, until just set with a slight wobble at the centre. Too hot and it curdles and weeps liquid under the jam.
- Butter the size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century measure: about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it into the warm milk before it goes onto the crumbs.
- A pint of bread crumbsVolume, not weight — roughly 3 to 4 oz of soft fresh crumbs from a day-old white loaf. Dried or packaged crumbs absorb far more milk and give a heavy, pasty base.
- Sweeten to tasteFor a quart of milk, about 1/2 cup of sugar is a reasonable reading. Soak the crumbs in the sweetened warm milk for 20 minutes before adding the yolks and lemon rind, or they float to the top and bake into a crust.
- "When cold" is optionalLater practice spreads the jam while the pudding is still warm, which lets it soften and spread without tearing the surface. If you follow the original and cool it fully, warm the jam first and use a light hand.
- The meringueFour teaspoons of powdered sugar for two whites is a soft, old-style meringue -- it browns fast and can bead. Two tablespoons per white gives a more stable foam. Add the lemon juice last and slowly; that much liquid slackens the froth.
- Browning the topThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 325F, for 15 to 20 minutes will colour it and cook the whites through. A hot oven or a broiler colours the peaks in two minutes but leaves the meringue barely cooked underneath.
- YieldFills a 2-quart dish and serves six. Serve the day it is made; the meringue collapses in the refrigerator overnight.
Queen of Puddings belongs to the long English tradition of using up stale bread in a sweetened custard, a thrift dish that gradually acquired good manners — first the layer of jam, then the meringue lid. It is often said to have been devised for Queen Victoria by the Buckingham Palace kitchens, though that attribution is traditional rather than documented, and versions of the layered bread custard appear in English cookery well before her reign. Its presence in a Butterick book is a reminder of who these volumes were for: the company sold dress patterns to American households, and its cook book offered the same thing in the kitchen — an English-inflected, respectable dish assembled from bread, milk and two eggs, costing almost nothing but looking like something.