When I was in graduate school, I taught a class called “American Women’s Fictions.” My students made their way through stories popular with American women.

We started with “Charlotte Temple,” a 1791 novel about an English schoolgirl who is seduced and brought to the American colonies by a British officer, only to be abandoned and die in poverty shortly after giving birth to a child.

We read “The Wide, Wide World” by Susan Warner, the 1850 story of a girl whom circumstances force to make her own way in life.

This book was considered the first American bestseller. Female-authored and-centered books like it prompted an envious Nathaniel Hawthorne to write bitterly of “a dammed mob of scribbling women.”

We breezed through the 20th century with film melodramas and musicals, soap operas and romance novels. If I were teaching the class today, I would doubtless include movies from the Hallmark Channel.

I’m not sure when I started watching Hallmark movies. I have certainly been watching them for several years. Like movie musicals and romance novels, they are generally predictable, but their predictability is part of their charm. The main character is almost always female, and she always finds love by the end of the film.

When I first started viewing these films, the lead performers were always white heterosexuals. People of color and LGBTQ characters were relegated to best-friend status if they appeared at all. In recent years, I’m happy to report, Hallmark has incorporated more diverse protagonists and stories.

Slowly, Black, Asian, and Latino actors have been allowed to play the leads. Same-sex couples also enjoy the main storyline from time to time, although their love stories follow the same patterns as the straight couples and end in the same rather chaste kisses.

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Some aspects of Hallmark movies drive me crazy. Many of them revolve around Christmas, but few of them are religious, which seems contradictory.

Product placements abound. When I see a plastic container of Folger’s coffee or can of Campbell’s soup on a kitchen counter, I sigh.

The films often include scientific and historical inaccuracies that exasperate me but may not worry most viewers. According to “National Media Spots,” only 13.8% of the channel’s viewers are college graduates. My Ph.D. makes me an outlier.

Nevertheless, I watch these films fairly frequently. Last week I spent three and a half hours watching Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It’s a masterpiece, and I appreciated it fully. It was depressing, however.

After making my way through its dismal if accurate portrayal of a dark chapter in American history, I was in the mood for a little humor and a happy ending. In short, I needed a Hallmark movie.

The film I watched was “Paging Mr. Darcy,” the first of four Jane Austen-themed films on Hallmark this month, which the network has dubbed ”Loveuary with Jane Austen.”

Hallmark movies have flirted with Austen over the years. Executives no doubt realize that their target audience has a fondness for “Pride and Prejudice.”

According to Forbes, that audience is women between 25 and 54, although many older women watch the films. Men make up about 25% of the viewership.

I would characterize the past films as “Jane Austen light.” Characters may have had Austen-inspired names, but there was no attempt to mimic Austen in any serious way.

This month’s films were also light. Light is, after all, the primary characteristic of a Hallmark film. Nevertheless, they did evoke Austen more systematically.

In “Paging Mr. Darcy,” a serious Jane Austen scholar hoping to be hired by Princeton goes to an Austen-themed conference and meets a handsome Englishman whose main duty at the conference is to dress as Mr. Darcy from “Pride and Prejudice.”

The scholar, who thinks of herself as extremely serious, strongly disapproves of such frivolity. Nevertheless, the two are thrown together by fate and end up dancing together (and kissing) at the party that ends the conference.

This film includes not just “Pride and Prejudice” subplots but also a hint of “Sense and Sensibility,” a story of contrasting temperaments between two sisters.

The serious, reserved scholar is visited by her sister, who never hesitates to express her emotions and loves to cry while binge watching romantic movies on television.

In “Love and Jane,” the ghost of Jane Austen visits a 40-something author suffering from writer’s block to give her advice about her career and her love life.

The third film, “An American in Austen,” features several scenes from “Pride and Prejudice.” In it, an Austen-loving American librarian falls asleep and finds herself living in that novel. She swoons over Mr. Darcy but soon realizes that she is better off with her less dashing boyfriend in the real world.

Although much of the action takes place in the 19th century, this is the most modern of the Loveuary films. It derives considerable humor from the differences between the two eras. The librarian longs for indoor plumbing and her cell phone.

The month’s final film, which aired last Saturday, is pure Jane Austen, a sumptuous remake of “Sense and Sensibility” with a racially diverse cast, in “Bridgerton” style. Not surprisingly, it has the tightest plot of the four films. It’s hard to out-plot Jane Austen.

You may be wondering when I’m going to get to a recipe. I do have one. In “Paging Mr. Darcy,” the Austen scholar and her cosplaying Mr. Darcy are conscripted to prepare an early 19th century luncheon when a caterer falls through.

Their main course is assorted meats purchased at a local sandwich shop. (One hopes the group they are feeding doesn’t include vegetarians.) They throw together their own dessert, however, a pudding-like substance that I believe is syllabub.

Syllabub was originally a drink made with wine, fruit, and milk or cream that was popular in England beginning in the 16th century. By Austen’s time, it had morphed into a sort of pudding made of cream, white wine, and citrus or cider. The alcohol and the citrus preserved and clotted the cream a bit.

I freely adapted the ingredients in the recipe below. Frankly, I didn’t want to ruin perfectly good whipped cream with wine. The flavor combination didn’t appeal to me. I did use a little Grand Marnier (an orange liqueur) to provide alcohol and to underline the flavor of the citrus.

This is a very rich dessert; you’re basically eating glorified whipped cream. It’s awfully tasty, however. I froze leftovers to spoon over apple or pecan pie at a future dinner party.

Ingredients:

1 cup whipping cream

1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on your sweet tooth (I used 1/3 cup)

1 tablespoon orange zest

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice

1/4 cup Grand Marnier

Instructions:

Whip the cream until soft peaks form. Gradually beat in the sugar, followed by the zest, the juice, and the liqueur. The mixture will be a little lighter than regular whipped cream but should still form soft peaks. Try not to overbeat it.

Cover the mixture and refrigerated it for at least 30 minutes to allow the flavors to meld. Serve it in small glasses. (I used my Waterford because Jane Austen deserves a little elegance.)

Makes 4 to 6 small servings.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.