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Delicious Lemon Pudding
The juice and grated rind of one lemon, cup sugar, yolks of two eggs, three well rounded table-spoons flour, a pinch of salt, one pint rich milk; mix the flour and part of the milk to a smooth paste, add the juice and rind of lemon, the cup of sugar, yolks well-beaten, the rest of the milk (after having rinsed out the egg with it), line plate with puff-paste one-fourth inch thick, pour in custard, bake in a quick oven until done. Beat whites to a stiff froth, add two table-spoons sugar, spread over the top, return to oven and brown. Serve with very cold cream; or, for a very nice dish, add whipped This is a rich and not an expensive pudding. The recipe cream. makes sufficient for six. - Mrs. Col. Woods, Greensburg, Pa.
This is a lemon custard pie under meringue, filed among puddings because it is baked in a crust-lined plate rather than a deep dish. The text has a typesetting scramble near the end — the words "whipped" and "cream" have been transposed across the sentence about cost; the intent is "or, for a very nice dish, add whipped cream."
- The hinge: temper the acid inLemon juice will curdle milk on contact if the mixture sits cold and unstirred. Whisk the flour-and-milk paste smooth first, then add the juice, sugar and yolks with the whisk moving, and get it into the oven promptly. The flour is what holds the custard together once the acid goes in.
- A quick ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F; period sources are not precise. That is right for setting the puff paste, but a custard held that high the whole time will curdle at the edges. Start hot for about 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 325-350F for another 25-30 minutes, until the centre wobbles as a single mass rather than rippling.
- MeasuresOne pint of milk is 2 cups. A cup of granulated sugar is about 7 oz by weight. "Three well rounded table-spoons" of flour is somewhere around 4 to 6 level tablespoons, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 oz.
- Rich milkUnskimmed milk from a farm or dairy, somewhat fattier than standardised modern whole milk. Something like 1 1/2 cups whole milk plus 1/2 cup single or heavy cream will approximate it.
- Rinsing the eggThe instruction to rinse out the egg bowl with the remaining milk is not quaintness — yolk clings, and this recovers it. Worth doing.
- Puff paste at a quarter inchThat is thick for pastry, and a wet custard poured onto raw puff will soak the base. Blind-bake the lined plate for 10 minutes with weights before filling, or use a short crust, which is the more forgiving choice under a liquid filling.
- The meringueTwo tablespoons of sugar to two whites is a soft, old-style meringue that weeps if it stands. Spread it so it touches the crust all round to anchor it, and brown at 350°F for 12–15 minutes rather than under a fierce heat, which colours the top before the interior sets.
- YieldSix, as stated. Best eaten the day it is made; the meringue slumps overnight.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the large family of late-nineteenth-century American compilations built from contributed recipes, each signed with a name and a town — here Mrs. Col. Woods of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, which tells you these books circulated well outside the region their titles claimed. The dish itself sits at the point where English lemon puddings shaded into what Americans would come to call lemon meringue pie: a flour-thickened custard sharpened with juice and rind, baked in pastry, capped with the whites left over from the yolks. Cornstarch is often said to have been displacing flour as the thickener around this period, and a version made with flour has a softer, more custardy set than the clear, sliceable filling of twentieth-century recipes. The closing note that it is "rich and not an expensive pudding" is characteristic of the genre: one has the impression that contributors were praising economy as often as flavour, and a dessert built on two eggs, a pint of milk and one lemon was a genuine argument for itself.