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Queen of Puddings
One pint fine sifted bread-crumbs, one quart milk, one cup sugar, yolks of four eggs, a piece of butter the size of an egg (some add ⚫grated rind of lemon); bake until donė-but do not allow to become watery-and spread with a layer of jelly. Whip whites of eggs to a stiff froth with five table-spoons sugar, and juice of one lemon, spread on the top and brown. Good with or without sauce, and very good cold. Make a hard sauce for it as follows: One cup very light brown sugar, half cup butter, half grated rind and the juice of one lemon; beat until very light. Vanilla may be used instead of the lemon.
Or, for cocoa-nut pudding, soak half cup dessicated cocoa-nut in boiling hot milk for half an hour or more, and add to the pudding, baking and finishing as above; or for orange pudding add a half dozen grated oranges. - Mrs. Prof. R. P. Kidder, Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
A soft bread-and-milk custard under jam and meringue, in the classic English form. The whole thing hinges on not overbaking the custard base — the warning "do not allow to become watery" is about curdling, not evaporation.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. The same phrase turns up throughout this book and is consistently in that range.
- A pint of crumbsMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups. The recipe's "fine sifted" may mean dried and sieved crumbs as readily as soft fresh ones; soft crumbs from day-old white bread would run near 4 oz, while dry commercial crumbs are much denser and will make a heavier, pastier pudding.
- Oven heatBake the custard base at 325-350F. Above that the eggs tighten and weep whey, which is exactly the wateriness the recipe warns against; the pudding is done when the centre is just set and barely trembles.
- Scald and soakHeating the quart of milk with the butter, pouring it over the crumbs and letting it stand fifteen minutes before beating in the yolks and sugar is the usual handling for a crumb custard, though the recipe does not say so; the crumbs need to swell or they float to the top.
- The jelly layerA tart red preserve — currant, raspberry, damson — warmed slightly so it spreads without tearing the set custard. Spread it on the hot pudding straight from the oven.
- Browning the meringueReturn it to a 350F oven for 12-15 minutes, which sets the meringue through rather than just colouring it. A broiler will brown the surface in a minute but leaves the interior raw and liable to weep.
- "Hard sauce" here is not hard sauce"Hard sauce" -- The name means creamed butter and sugar served firm, and that is what this is — beat the brown sugar, butter, rind and juice until pale, then chill until firm and serve in a scoop on the hot pudding.
- A half dozen grated orangesGrate the zest and use the juice and pulp of six oranges — that is a great deal of acid to add to a milk custard, and it may well curdle. A safer reading is the zest of six with the juice of two, added after baking with the jelly layer.
- YieldA quart of milk in a two-quart dish serves eight to ten.
Queen of puddings belongs to the long English tradition of stretching stale bread with milk and eggs, and the meringue-and-jam finish is what lifts it from nursery food to a dish worth naming for a queen — the association with Victoria is traditional rather than documented, and related puddings appear in print under various names well before it settled. Its place in The Dixie Cook Book, credited to a professor's wife in Cape Girardeau, is typical of the compiled American community cookbook of the 1880s: a thoroughly British pudding arrives via a contributor's own kitchen, with local variations tacked on the end. Those variations are the interesting part. Desiccated coconut was a new convenience in the 1880s, and its appearance here alongside the oranges shows a Missouri household reaching for goods that would have been unobtainable a generation earlier.