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Meringue Pudding
Put three tablespoonfuls of cornstarch into a basin, blend it until smooth with a small quantity of water, then mix in by degrees one pint of boiling milk; sweeten with two tablespoonfuls of sugar, and turn it into a saucepan. Stir the cornstarch over the fire with a wooden spoon, and boil it for five minutes; then move it to the side and stir in two ounces of butter broken into small pieces. When the butter has dissolved put in, one at a time, the yolks of four eggs, and beat them well. Butter a round pie-dish, put in one pint of canned peaches, and pour the cornstarch over them. Place the pudding in a brisk oven and bake for from twenty-five to thirty-minutes. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth together with two heaping tablespoonfuls of sugar. When the pudding is cooked, spread over the egg mixture, raising it to a point in the center, and return it to the oven for four or five minutes to set the meringue. When cooked take the pudding from the oven and place it away until quite cold. Then decorate it with candied fruits and angelica, serve on a flat plate, and surround it with a colored paper frill.
A cornstarch custard baked over canned peaches and capped with meringue — closer to a blancmange than a sponge pudding. Two details decide whether it works: the starch must be fully cooked before the yolks go in, and the yolks must go in off the heat.
- Oven temperature"Brisk" means a hot oven, roughly in the 400 to 450F range; the book gives no number. The pudding bakes 25 to 30 minutes at that heat; the meringue goes back in for only 4 to 5 minutes, so watch it, as a hot oven will color a meringue fast.
- Off the fire for the yolks"Move it to the side" means off direct heat. Four yolks stirred into boiling starch will scramble in threads. Let the mixture stop bubbling, work in the butter, then the yolks one at a time.
- Boil the starch properlyThe full five minutes at a boil is not padding — undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky and thins again as it cools. Stir constantly with a wooden spoon; the paste is thick enough to catch and scorch.
- Canned peachesA pint of canned peach halves or slices, drained well. Syrup left in the dish will thin the custard and make the base weep under the meringue.
- VesselA "round pie-dish" here would be a shallow ceramic baking dish, likely something in the 8-to-9-inch range; a pint of fruit plus a pint of custard is roughly four cups, so allow headroom for the meringue.
- Meringue and sugarTwo heaping tablespoons of sugar to four whites is a lean, soft meringue by modern standards. Beat the whites to soft peaks first, then add the sugar gradually, or it will not hold the peak the recipe asks you to raise in the center.
- CoolingChilled meringue baked this briefly will bead and slump after a few hours, so serve the day it is made. Cooling "quite cold" also lets the starch set firm enough to cut.
- Angelica and the frillCandied angelica stems are still sold by baking suppliers; candied cherries and citron peel do the same job. The "colored paper frill" is table dressing of the period, wrapped around the dish, not something edible.
- YieldServes six to eight as written.
Oscar Tschirky's book belongs to the moment when cornstarch had become a standard American pantry item and canned fruit an unremarkable one — this pudding depends on both. Cornstarch had been manufactured in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, and by the 1890s the boiled cornstarch custard was, by most accounts, a common dessert in hotel and household cookery alike, cheaper than a baked egg custard and far more forgiving. What marks it as Waldorf work is the finish rather than the substance: the meringue raised to a point, the candied fruit and angelica, the flat plate, the paper frill. The pudding itself is a nursery dish; the presentation is dining-room. Angelica, the candied stem of Angelica archangelica, was the standard green in that decorative vocabulary.