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Meringue Pudding
Mrs. C. A. Rogers.
One pint of stale bread crumbs, one quart of milk, the yolks of four eggs, butter the size of an egg, a small cup of sugar, salt, the grated rind of one lemon; bake threequarters of an hour. When cool, spread the top with preserves or jelly; beat the whites of the eggs with five tablespoons of pulverized sugar; spread on the pudding, and brown in a quick oven; eat with cream.
A custard-based bread pudding finished with meringue — what English cookbooks of the same decade called Queen of Puddings. The original assumes you know how to judge a set custard and a hot oven, so those are the two things worth pinning down.
- The hinge: bake the base gentlyThe recipe gives a time but no oven; three-quarters of an hour suggests a moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 350F. The mixture is a custard held together by four yolks in a quart of milk, so it should set, not boil; if it puffs and weeps, the oven was too hot. A 2-quart baking dish set in a pan of hot water is a safe route.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books commonly sized butter against familiar objects such as a walnut or an egg, each standing for a different amount.
- A small cup of sugarCups were not standardised in the 1870s; read this as about 2/3 cup for the custard. The five tablespoons of pulverized sugar for the meringue is closer to 1/3 cup.
- Pulverized sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Ordinary granulated will work if you beat it in gradually.
- A pint of stale bread crumbsA volume measure, not weight — roughly 3 to 5 ounces of soft crumbs torn from stale bread. Dried packaged crumbs will absorb far more milk and give a pasty pudding.
- Soak firstThe original just lists the ingredients, but it helps to pour the milk over the crumbs and let them swell before stirring in the yolks, sugar, butter, salt and lemon rind.
- Quick oven for the meringue425 to 450F, and watch it. The pudding is already cooked and cold; the meringue needs only three to five minutes to colour. Left in for the quarter-hour a modern reader might assume, it turns dry and beaded.
- YieldSix to eight servings. "Eat with cream" most likely indicates plain cream poured over rather than whipped.
The Home Cook Book was issued in Chicago in the mid-1870s, in more than one edition, compiled from recipes contributed by named local women — Mrs. C. A. Rogers here — and sold for charity, a format that spread through American church and hospital fundraising for the next fifty years. The pudding itself belongs to the long tradition of using up stale bread: crumbs, milk and eggs baked into a custard, then dressed up with jelly and a meringue cap so it could leave the kitchen and appear at a company table. The same construction is generally traced to English recipes for Queen of Puddings, which used breadcrumbs, lemon rind and raspberry jam in exactly this order; the American versions substituted whatever preserve was in the cellar.