Lemon Pudding
To make two puddings take two fine large ripe lemons, and rub them under your hand on a table. Grate off the thin yellow rind upon a large lump of loaf sugar. Cut the lemon, and squeeze the juice into a saucer through a strainer, to avoid the seeds. Put half a pound of powdered white sugar into a deep earthen pan, (including the sugar on which you have rubbed the lemons) and cut up in it half a pound of the best fresh butter, adding the juice. Stir them to a light cream with a wooden spaddle, which is shorter than a mush-stick, and flattened at one end; that end rather thin, and rather broad. Beat in a shallow pan, (with hickory rods) six eggs, till very thick and smooth, and stir them gradually into the mixture. Have ready some of the best puff-paste, made in the proportion of a pint or half a pound of very nice fresh butter to a pint or half a pound of sifted flour. Take china or white-ware dishes with broad rims. Butter the rim, and lay round it neatly a border of the paste. Put no paste inside the dish beneath the mixture. Fill each dish to the top with the pudding mixture, and set it immediately into the oven. It will bake in about half an hour When done, and browned on the surface, set it to cool, and send it to table in the dish it was baked in.
Fine puddings are now made without an under crust, but merely a handsome border of puff-paste laid round the edge, and helped with the pudding. Sift sugar over the surface. This quantity will make one large pudding, or two small ones.
To almost all puddings the flavor of lemon or orange is an improvement. A genuine baked lemon pudding, (such as was introduced by the justly celebrated Mrs. Goodfellow,) and is well known at Philadelphia dinner parties, must have no flour or bread whatever. The mixture only of butter, sugar, and eggs, (with the proper flavoring) and when baked it cuts down smooth and shining, like a nice custard. Made this way, they are among the most delicious of puddings; but, of course, are not intended for children or invalids. We have already given numerous receipts for plain family desserts. In this chapter the receipts are “for company.” The author was really a pupil of Mrs. Goodfellow’s, and for double the usual term, and while there took notes of every thing that was made, it being the desire of the liberal and honest instructress that her scholars should learn in reality.