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Lemon Pudding
Mrs. Wyllie.
Half pound of sugar, half pound of butter, five eggs, half gill brandy, rind and juice of one large lemon; beat well the butter and sugar; whisk the eggs; add them to the lemon, grate the peel; line a dish with puff paste and bake in a moderate oven.
A rich baked lemon custard in a pastry shell — closer to a lemon chess pie than to anything spooned from a bowl. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to build a custard, so the order of operations needs filling in.
- The measurements in modern termsHalf a pound of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups; half a pound of butter is two sticks. Half a gill on the imperial measure this book would have used is about 2 1/2 fluid ounces — a generous 1/4 cup.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. If the filling browns or puffs before the centre sets, drop to 325F and give it longer.
- The hinge: do not let it boil or overbakeThis is an egg-and-butter custard with acid in it. Take it out when the centre still wobbles slightly — around 170-175F internal. Pushed further, the eggs curdle and weep liquid into the crust.
- Butter temperature"Beat well the butter and sugar" only works with butter at proper room temperature, around 65F. Melted butter gives a greasy, separated filling rather than a creamed base.
- Assembling, since the original skips itAssembling -- Cream butter and sugar, whisk the eggs and add them gradually, then stir in the lemon juice, grated zest and brandy last. Note that this reverses the original, which whisks the eggs and adds them to the lemon; acid meeting eggs before they are dispersed in fat encourages curdling.
- Blind-bake the shellPuff paste under a wet filling turns to paste again. Line the dish, chill it, and bake it empty with weights until the base is dry and lightly coloured before the filling goes in.
- LemonAim for about 3 tablespoons of juice and the zest of one lemon; avoid the white pith, which turns the filling bitter.
- YieldRoughly one 9-inch tart, though this quantity of filling may overfill a single shell; cut into eight small, very rich slices. Serve at room temperature or barely warm — hot, the filling has not finished firming.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was a compiled charity cookbook, sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and many of the receipts carry the name of the woman who gave it — here Mrs. Wyllie. That format explains the telegraphic style: these were notes passed between cooks who already knew the method, not instructions written for beginners. The dish itself belongs to a long English line of "lemon puddings" baked in a paste-lined dish, which appear in eighteenth-century receipt books and are generally regarded as the ancestors of the American lemon chess and transparent pies. The brandy is typical of the period, when spirits were used as a flavouring in sweet dishes as routinely as vanilla extract is now, and the heavy hand with butter and sugar marks it as a company dish rather than everyday family food.