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Bird's Nest Pudding
Take sour apples, peel, quarter and core enough to cover the bottom of a common square tin. Make a batter of one cup of buttermilk, one-half cupful of cream, two eggs, a little salt, one teaspoonful of soda, and flour enough to thicken about like fritters. Pour this over the apples and bake in a quick oven. Eat while hot, with butter or cream sauce.
XVIII. Puddings of Grain, etc.
A buttermilk batter pudding baked over apples, in the plain New England style. The original assumes a cook who knows what fritter batter looks like and owns one size of tin.
- Mix and bake at onceThe soda begins reacting with the buttermilk the moment the two meet. Have the apples in the greased tin and the oven up to temperature before you combine anything, and get the batter into the oven immediately or the lift is gone.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. The batter needs a fast set so it puffs around the fruit rather than soaking into it.
- "A common square tin"An 8- or 9-inch square pan. Grease it well; the apple juices caramelise and stick.
- Sour applesFirm tart cooking apples - Granny Smith, Bramley, Rhode Island Greening, Northern Spy. Sweet dessert apples collapse into sauce and leave the pudding wet underneath.
- "Flour enough to thicken about like fritters"Roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups, giving a batter that ribbons thickly off the spoon rather than pouring freely. Add it gradually and stop when it mounds slightly.
- The sodaA full teaspoon is generous for about 1 1/2 cups of liquid and can leave a soapy edge. Three-quarters of a teaspoon is safer unless the buttermilk is markedly sour.
- Cream sauceIn this period this usually means a sweet pudding sauce - butter creamed with sugar, thinned with cream and flavoured with nutmeg or vanilla - rather than a savoury white sauce.
- Timing and yieldThe recipe gives none. Expect 30 to 40 minutes, until the top is well browned and a skewer comes out clean at the centre. Serves six, and it is genuinely best straight from the oven; it sinks and toughens as it cools.
"Bird's nest pudding" was a standing name in nineteenth-century American cookery for apples baked under or inside a batter or custard, the fruit sitting in the dish like eggs in a nest - some versions use whole cored apples, which makes the image plainer than this quartered one does. It belongs to the same family of frugal fruit-and-batter puddings as the slump, the grunt and the cobbler. The buttermilk-and-soda leavening is suggestive of its period: before commercial baking powder became common in the domestic kitchen, cooks relied on an acid dairy liquid to activate saleratus or soda, which is why so many recipes of this era specify sour milk or buttermilk and treat it as an ingredient rather than a substitute.