Cook apples and sweeten to taste. Mash well with 1 tablespoonful of butter. Beat the yolks of 3 eggs with 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, the juice and rind of ½ lemon; add the whites beaten to a stiff froth. Put in a buttered pudding-dish and bake in a moderate oven until done.
A one-line souffléd apple pudding of the sort that filled the sweet course in late-Victorian and Edwardian households. The recipe assumes you know how much apple to use and how long to bake it, so the notes below fill in what it leaves out.
- How much appleNo quantity is given. Three eggs will carry roughly 2 cups (about 1 lb, or 3 medium) of cooked, mashed apple; much more and the mixture is too heavy to rise. Cook the apples down until dry rather than watery — excess juice is what makes this kind of pudding sink.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F (period "moderate" is usually rendered somewhere between 325F and 375F). At that heat the base sets before the egg white collapses; hotter and the top browns and cracks while the centre is still loose.
- Timing and donenessIn a buttered 1½-quart dish, expect 30 to 40 minutes. "Until done" means well puffed, evenly browned, and only slightly tremulous at the centre; a knife slipped into the middle should come out clean of raw egg.
- Fold, do not stirThe whites go in last for a reason. Fold them into the warm-but-not-hot apple base in two or three additions with a spatula. If the apple purée is still hot it will deflate the whites on contact.
- Pudding-dishAny straight-sided baking dish will do; there is no need for a collared soufflé mould. Butter it generously and, if you want more lift, dust the butter with sugar so the batter can climb.
- Lemon rind"Rind" here means the zest only, finely grated. The white pith beneath is bitter, so pare or grate lightly.
- Sweetening"Sweeten to taste" applies to the apples themselves, in addition to the 2 tablespoons beaten into the yolks. Cooking apples of the time were sharper than most supermarket varieties, so taste before adding sugar to a Braeburn or Golden Delicious purée.
- Yield and servingServes four, and must go to the table straight from the oven — it begins to fall within a few minutes. Cream or a thin custard poured at the table is a common accompaniment of the period.
Apples beaten up with eggs and baked were a standard economy at the sweet end of the meal: the fruit was cheap and keeping, the eggs did the work that flour and long steaming did in a heavier pudding. Books of this kind, arranged as a dish for every day of the year and labelled by nationality, seem to have treated "French" less as a claim of origin than as a signal of method — the lightness got from beaten whites. The technique is a soufflé only loosely; a comparable French dish, the nineteenth-century soufflé aux pommes, folds whipped whites into a stiff apple marmalade in much this way. Its appearance in a calendar cookbook shows how far the vocabulary of French pastry had spread by the turn of the century, even where the cook had no soufflé mould and no scales.