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Plain Apple Pudding
Pare, quarter and core apples to fill a small dish rather more than half, and pour in water two inches deep. Make a crust of one pint of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, and baking powder enough to make it light. Add a level teaspoonful of lard, and flour enough to make a wet dough, and roll out quickly, put over the pudding-dish, and set on a hot stove. Cover tightly with a tin cover, on which put a flat-iron. The steam produced cooks the pudding quickly. Fifteen minutes will be found long enough. Serve hot, with hard sauce made of butter and sugar.
This is a stovetop steamed pudding rather than a baked pie: the biscuit crust cooks in the steam trapped under a weighted lid. Two things in the original text need attention before you start.
- The flour is measured twiceThe dough is one pint of flour (about 2 cups, 8-9 oz) with salt, baking powder and lard, then "flour enough to make a wet dough" -- which is contradictory. Read it as a soft drop-biscuit dough: the pint of flour plus roughly 3/4 cup of water or milk, adding a little more flour only if it will not hold a shape under the rolling pin.
- Baking powder "enough to make it light"A modern proportion of roughly 1 teaspoon per cup of flour would give about 2 teaspoons for a pint. Nineteenth-century baking powders varied in strength, though whether that is why the amount is left open is guesswork.
- A teaspoonful of lard is not a typoA teaspoonful of lard may be intentional -- a very lean crust, with the steam rather than the fat doing the work -- but it could equally be a misprint, and the text gives no way to tell. If you want something closer to a dumpling top, 2-3 tablespoons of lard or butter rubbed in gives a tenderer result without changing the method.
- The flat-ironIts only job is to hold the lid down so steam cannot escape. Any heavy lid, or an ordinary lid with a full kettle or a foil-wrapped brick on top, does the same. The seal matters more than the weight.
- "Set on a hot stove" means gentle, not fierce"Set on a hot stove" -- the text does call for a hot stove and a quick fifteen minutes. On a modern burner, direct high heat will scorch the water at the bottom before the apples soften, so put the dish on a trivet or ring inside a covered pot with an inch of water, or keep the flame moderate.
- Fifteen minutes is optimistic for thick applesThat is enough for the crust, but quartered apples will still be firm. Slice them thin, or allow 25-30 minutes and check with a knife tip through the crust.
- Apple choiceApples that break down quickly, such as Bramley or McIntosh, suit the short cooking time; firm dessert varieties will still be crunchy at the end of it.
- Hard sauceBeat 1/2 cup softened butter with 1 cup sifted powdered or fine caster sugar until pale, and chill. It is served cold in spoonfuls so it melts into the hot pudding; a little vanilla or nutmeg is usual.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a "small dish" of this sort would probably serve about four.
Steamed puddings cooked on top of the stove were the practical answer to a range whose oven was unreliable or already occupied, and to a summer kitchen nobody wanted to heat further. The method -- fruit, water, a raised biscuit lid, a tight cover weighted with a sadiron -- belongs to the same family as the English suet-crust pudding boiled in a cloth, but takes a fraction of the time and none of the fuss. The flat-iron was in domestic use across most of the nineteenth century and later: solid cast-iron irons were heated on the range top, so one was always to hand and always heavy. Hard sauce, of which the British brandy butter is a version made with spirits, is the standard accompaniment to steamed and boiled puddings in American cookbooks of the period, and is often served plain with butter and sugar only, as here.