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Quince Pudding
Pare and grate six large ripe quinces, mix well with half a pint cream and one cup sugar, beat yolks of seven eggs and whites of two, adding two wine-glasses of rose-water; when all is well mixed bake three quarters of an hour in a buttered dish. Beat whites of five eggs with three table-spoons powdered sugar, put on top of pudding, and brown a few minutes. - Miss Tyson.
A baked quince custard under a meringue, written for cooks who had a quince tree and a heavy hand with rose-water. Two things need adjusting before it will work in a modern kitchen: the fruit and the flowers.
- Raw grated quinceQuince is dense, astringent and gritty when raw, and 45 minutes in a custard will not soften it the way it softens apples. Modern practice is to poach or bake the peeled fruit until tender, then purée or grate it before mixing; the pudding will otherwise be fibrous and mouth-puckering.
- Rose-waterTwo wine-glasses is roughly half a cup. Rose-water strength varied a great deal, and much of it was home- or locally distilled and probably weaker than the concentrated bottled product sold today; half a cup of modern rose-water will likely taste soapy. Start with a teaspoon and adjust to taste.
- Half a pint creamOne cup. With seven yolks and two whites this is a rich custard base rather than a batter, so it sets by coagulation, not by rising.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Treat it as a baked custard at 325-350F, and set the buttered dish in a pan of hot water to keep the edges from curdling while the centre sets. It is done when a knife near the middle comes out clean.
- Browning the meringue"Brown a few minutes" implies a hot oven -- somewhere around 400-450F -- or a few inches under a broiler with the door watched. The five whites and three spoons of sugar make a soft, lightly sweetened meringue; beat to stiff peaks and get it onto a still-warm pudding so the underside sets.
- Egg economyThe recipe uses seven yolks with only two whites, and the five spare whites go on top, so seven eggs are consumed exactly with nothing left over.
- YieldProbably six to eight servings; the recipe names no dish, so something around two quarts. Serve warm or at room temperature the day it is made; the meringue weeps in the refrigerator.
Quinces were a fixture of Southern and Midwestern kitchen gardens in the nineteenth century precisely because they were useless raw: too hard and too sour to eat out of hand, but full of pectin and perfume once cooked, which made them the standard fruit for jellies, marmalades and preserves. Pairing them with rose-water and a great many egg yolks belongs to a much older English tradition of baked fruit-and-cream puddings, and rose-water as a sweet flavouring is generally said to have been in decline by around this period, displaced by cheap vanilla extract, which makes its appearance here slightly old-fashioned for the book's date. The Dixie Cook Book was assembled in the same manner as the Buckeye books it was adapted from: recipes solicited from named contributors, so "Miss Tyson" is a real household's version of the dish rather than an editor's standardised formula. As in virtually all recipes of the period, the oven temperature and dish size are left to the cook's judgement.