Pudding
Chopped together, not too fine, a half cupful of raisins and a half cupful of walnut meats; grate over them the rind of one lemon and add the juice; also a tablespoonful of brandy. Then beat to a stiff froth the whites of six eggs, add a heaping cupful of granulated sugar, beaten in stiff, and then beat in last of all very lightly, the moist ingredients and quickly get it in the oven for twenty minutes. It should turn out a light fluffy puff and delicious.
A meringue puff rather than a pudding in the boiled-and-steamed sense: six whites, a cup of sugar, and a handful of fruit and nuts folded in at the last second. The recipe gives no oven temperature, no dish and no yield, so a few decisions have to be made for it.
- The hingeEverything depends on folding the wet ingredients in without knocking the air out of the whites. The lemon juice and brandy are liquid and heavy; add them with the fruit and nuts in three additions, cutting down and over with a spatula, and stop while streaks are still visible.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A sugar-heavy meringue set in twenty minutes wants a moderate oven, 325-350F. Hotter than that and the outside browns and weeps before the centre sets.
- Beating the sugar in"A heaping cupful" beaten in stiff means adding the sugar gradually to whites already at soft peak and beating to a glossy, stiff meringue. Dumping a full cup in at once collapses the foam and leaves the sugar gritty.
- DishUse a buttered baking dish or deep pie plate large enough to take the whole foam without crowding. The mixture climbs as it bakes and sinks as it cools, so do not fill past two-thirds.
- Walnut meatsSimply shelled walnut halves. Chop them coarsely as directed: finely chopped nuts release oil, and oil is what flattens a meringue.
- BrandyOne tablespoon is for flavour, not lift, and some of the alcohol cooks off. It can be left out with no structural consequence.
- Yield and servingServes six modestly. It is best eaten warm within an hour of baking, when the crust is still crisp over a marshmallowy centre; whipped cream or a thin custard sauce would suit it.
This is a member of the family of "puff" or "snow" puddings that spread through American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, a rise often linked to the arrival of reliable eggbeaters and cheap refined sugar. Where an eighteenth-century pudding could mean something suet-bound and boiled in a cloth for hours, though baked and custard puddings were equally current, by 1900 the word covered almost any sweet course, and the fashionable end of it was deliberately weightless: beaten whites, granulated sugar, fruit and nuts, twenty minutes in the oven. Raisins and walnuts were common dessert additions, and the lemon rind and spoonful of brandy do the work that vanilla extract would do in a later recipe. The instruction to get it into the oven quickly may suggest a cook working without chemical leavening of any kind, and knowing that the only thing holding the dish up is air.