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Lemon Meringue
Soak two breakfast cupfuls of stale breadcrumbs in one quart of new milk, then stir with them one breakfast cupful of sugar, the yolks of four eggs, and the grated rind of a lemon. Beat these until light, then pour into a buttered baking-dish and bake like a custard, spreading some fruit jelly over the meringue. Beat the whites of four eggs together with four tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar and the juice of one lemon to a stiff froth, spread it over the top, and bake till brown. Serve either hot or cold.
This is a bread-and-custard pudding under meringue rather than a pie — no pastry is involved anywhere. The wording of the jelly step is scrambled in the original; read the points below before starting.
- The jelly goes on before the meringueAs printed, the jelly is spread "over the meringue," which cannot happen while the custard is still baking. The likely intended order, on the model of similar bread-and-meringue puddings, is: bake the custard until set, spread a thin layer of jelly over the hot surface, then pile on the meringue and return it to the oven to colour.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Take it as a generous 1 cup — for breadcrumbs the measure is loose anyway; soft fresh crumbs run about 2 oz a cup, dried or fine crumbs nearer 4 oz.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured. Modern whole milk works; the custard sets more reliably if you warm the milk before pouring it over the crumbs.
- Oven temperature"Bake like a custard" means a moderate to slow oven, 325-350F, and ideally a dish standing in a pan of hot water. The custard is done when the centre is just set and no longer sloshes, roughly 40 to 50 minutes for a quart in a 2-quart dish.
- Browning the meringueReturn the dish to a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes, until the peaks are tan and the meringue is dry to the touch. Higher heat browns it before the interior sets and it will weep as it cools.
- Lemon juice in the whitesThe acid helps stabilise the foam. Many cooks add it once the whites are frothy or at soft peaks, alternating with the powdered sugar, on the grounds that acid added at the very start can lengthen the whipping time.
- YieldA quart of milk plus crumbs fills a 2-quart baking dish and serves six to eight. Cold it slices more neatly; hot it is spooned.
This is the pudding the English call Queen of Puddings — a lemon-scented bread custard, a layer of jam, and a meringue lid — and its lineage is generally traced to the thrifty seventeenth- and eighteenth-century habit of soaking stale bread in milk and eggs rather than throwing it out. Its presence in a Waldorf book is a reminder that a hotel kitchen of the period was expected to produce plain nursery and household puddings alongside the elaborate menus.