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Pretty Pudding
Mrs. Charles Bradbury.
One tablespoon flour wet with one-half cup of cold milk, the yolks of three eggs beaten, one small cup sugar; mix these together; put one quart of milk in a kettle and set it in boiling water; when the milk is at the boiling point, stir in the above mixture with vanilla or rose flavouring; stir till it begins to thicken, then take it off and let it cool a little; pour it into a pudding dish or cups; then beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, add a teaspoon of fine white sugar, and drop it on the top of the custard in rounds about as large as an egg ; put a small spoon of currant or other tart jelly on the middle of each round; serve cold.
A stirred custard under raw meringue — the custard base is sound, but the topping is never cooked, and that is where the recipe fails by current standards.
- The uncooked whitesThe egg whites are beaten with sugar and dropped raw onto custard that has already been taken off the heat and cooled. Nothing in the method brings them anywhere near a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the finished dish is then held cold, which preserves rather than reduces the risk. If you want floating island, use a current recipe in which the meringues are poached or the whites are pasteurized.
- Why this differs from a cooked meringueA baked meringue or a poached snow-egg gets sustained heat; a spoonful of raw froth resting on cooling custard gets none. The residual warmth of the custard is well below any meaningful threshold by the time the rounds go on.
- "Set it in boiling water"This is a double boiler in all but name — a kettle standing in a pan of boiling water. It is the correct approach for an egg-thickened milk custard, which curdles quickly over direct heat.
- "One small cup sugar"Nineteenth-century cups were not standardised, and "small cup" is not a defined measure. The original is genuinely imprecise and the custard tolerates a range.
- Rose flavouringRose water appears alongside vanilla as a flavouring in household books of the period. Modern rose waters vary greatly in strength, so treat any quantity as approximate and add to taste.
- YieldA quart of milk with three yolks gives a thin, pourable custard rather than a set pudding; the recipe itself offers a pudding dish or cups. The tablespoon of flour helps thicken and stabilise it.
This is floating island, a dessert often set alongside the French œufs à la neige — snow eggs afloat on a thin custard sea — though the French version poaches its whites, which this recipe does not do. It appears often in Anglo-American household books from the early nineteenth century onward. The flour in the custard marks it as a domestic rather than a professional version: a home cook working with three eggs and a quart of milk needed insurance against curdling. The dab of currant jelly at the centre of each white round is the period's standard finish, currant jelly being the tart preserve most likely to be standing in a well-stocked pantry. The Home Cook Book itself belongs to the compiled-by-subscription genre: recipes contributed under the contributors' own names, gathered by a committee of women and sold to raise money for a charitable institution, which is why a page like this reads as a signed personal receipt rather than an anonymous instruction.