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Preserves Pudding
Mrs. R. Beaty.
One pint of bread crumbs, one quart of milk, eight tablespoons sugar, yolks of four eggs; beat yolks and sugar together, then stir in the crumbs with the boiling milk and the rind of one lemon. When the pudding is done, beat the whites to a stiff froth with two tablespoons white sugar. Spread the pudding with jam or jelly over the ligh top, then put on whites of egg and bake to a light brown.
This is a queen of puddings under another name: a baked bread-and-custard base, a layer of jam, and a meringue browned on top. The original assumes you know when a custard is set, so the numbers below fill in what it leaves out.
- The hinge: scald, do not boil, and pour hot milk slowlyThe hinge: pour the hot milk in slowly -- the recipe calls for boiling milk, which will scramble the yolks if it goes in all at once. Pour it in a thin stream while whisking, then stir in the crumbs and let them swell before baking.
- Bread crumbsA pint of crumbs means a full 2 cups, soft crumbs torn from day-old bread rather than dry commercial crumb. Dried packaged crumbs absorb far more liquid and give a pasty pudding.
- Oven temperatureBake the custard base at 325F until just set in the centre, roughly 45 to 55 minutes in a 2-quart dish. The meringue goes back into the same oven, or up to 350F, for 12 to 15 minutes until light brown.
- Lemon rindUse the zest of one lemon, coloured part only; the white pith is bitter. Rubbing the zest into the sugar before beating in the yolks extracts more oil than simply stirring it in.
- Jam layerWarm the jam or jelly slightly so it spreads over the hot pudding without tearing the surface. "Over the ligh top" looks like a typesetting slip, most likely for "light top", though what was intended cannot be established.
- The meringueFour whites with two tablespoons of sugar is a soft, old-fashioned meringue that weeps if it stands. Beat to stiff peaks, spread so it touches the rim of the dish all round to stop it shrinking, and serve the pudding the day it is made.
- SweetnessEight tablespoons is half a cup of sugar in the base, before the jam and the meringue. Six is plenty if your preserves are sweet.
- YieldServes six to eight from a 2-quart baking dish. Good warm rather than hot, and it does not reheat well once meringued.
Puddings of this shape — stale crumbs, milk, eggs, a spread of preserves and a meringue lid — were standard English nursery and Sunday fare through the nineteenth century, and are often said to descend from the older bread-and-butter and "whitepot" puddings that used up bread before it went to waste. The name "queen of puddings" is generally thought to have attached itself to the version later, and recipes with all its parts appear to circulate before that under plain names like this one. Its appearance in The Home Cook Book, a Toronto community collection whose recipes carry named attributions though much of its content was taken over from earlier American community collections, is typical of the genre: a dish that costs almost nothing beyond eggs and a jar of last summer's jam. The instruction to spread the pudding with "jam or jelly" does not specify which.