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Lincoln Pudding
Mix two cups of well-cooked rice with threefourths of a cup of milk, three tablespoonfuls sugar, a little salt, and well-beaten yolks of two eggs.
Turn into a buttered pudding-dish and bake half an hour. Beat whites of eggs until stiff, add gradually three tablespoonfuls powdered sugar and juice of half a lemon. Pile meringue on pudding and bake twelve minutes in slow oven.
A leftover-rice custard with a lemon meringue lid, from the era when cold rice was a standing feature of the pantry. The original assumes you know what oven to use; here are the numbers.
- Oven temperaturesThe first bake is unspecified — a moderate oven, 350F, is right for a shallow rice custard. The meringue bake is called slow, meaning 300F, low enough to dry and set the whites without weeping or browning hard.
- "Well-cooked rice"This means rice boiled soft, not al dente — leftover rice from a plain boil or a rice pudding base. Two cups of cooked rice is roughly what two-thirds of a cup of raw long-grain yields. Dry, refrigerated rice will absorb the milk; if it looks stiff, add another tablespoon or two.
- The hinge: don't let the custard curdleOnly two yolks and three-quarters of a cup of milk are binding two cups of rice, so the mixture is thick and sets fast. Pull it when the centre is just barely trembling — half an hour at 350F in a shallow dish is usually enough, and overbaking leaves the egg grainy.
- Meringue proportionsThree tablespoons of sugar to two whites is a soft meringue, not a stiff pie meringue. Beat the whites to soft peaks first, then add the sugar gradually or it will deflate them; the lemon juice goes in last and also helps stabilise the foam.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today. Either works, but modern confectioners' sugar will give a slightly softer, chalkier meringue.
- Pudding-dishA shallow one to one-and-a-half quart baking dish, buttered. Depth matters more than volume — a deep dish leaves the centre wet while the meringue is already set.
- YieldFour modest servings. It is meant to be eaten warm, the day it is made; the meringue slumps and weeps in the refrigerator.
Books of this kind \> the American genre that flourished from the 1890s into the 1920s — treated cold cooked cereals as a standing resource rather than a problem. Rice puddings bound with egg and crowned with meringue were a standard trick for the purpose: the meringue costs two whites and a few spoonfuls of sugar and turns a bowl of yesterday's starch into something that can be sent to table as dessert. The Lincoln name is unexplained in the source and should not be read as a link to the president; a great many American recipes of the period carried the surnames of towns, hotels, cooking-school teachers or simply the contributor who sent them in. Mary J. Lincoln, of the Boston Cooking School, was among the best-known American cookery writers of the 1880s and 1890s, and dishes were frequently named after such figures, though the connection here is not documented.