Line a deep pie-dish with rich pie-paste. Let bake and fill with chopped apples, raisins and chopped nuts, sugar and a pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg. Then cover with cake-crumbs and let bake until done. Beat 3 whites of eggs with pulverized sugar; flavor with lemon and spread over the pudding. Set in the oven a few minutes to brown on top.
A sketch rather than a recipe: no quantities, no times, no temperatures. The bones are sound, but you supply the proportions.
- The hinge: bake the shell first"Line a deep pie-dish with rich pie-paste. Let bake" means blind-baking. Line the pastry with parchment and weights and bake at 400F for about 15 minutes, then remove the weights and give it 5 more, so the raw apple filling does not soak the base.
- Quantities to fill a deep dishFor a 9-inch deep dish, figure roughly 6 cups peeled chopped apples, 1/2 cup raisins, 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or almonds, 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar depending on the apples, and 1/4 teaspoon each cinnamon and nutmeg. A firm apple such as Braeburn or Granny Smith holds its shape.
- "Cake-crumbs"Dried crumbs from plain sponge or pound cake, not fresh crumbs from a soft loaf. They absorb the apple juices and stand in for a top crust. Stale sponge grated coarse, or crushed vanilla wafers, does the same job; a couple of tablespoons of melted butter tossed through helps them colour.
- Oven and second bakeThe book assumes you know the range. Bake the filled pie at 375F for 40 to 50 minutes, until the apples give no resistance to a knife point.
- The meringueThree whites take about 6 tablespoons of "pulverized" sugar; in period usage that meant a finely ground sugar, close to but not identical with modern confectioners' or powdered sugar, which is cut with cornstarch. Beat to soft peaks, add the sugar gradually, beat stiff and glossy, then add a teaspoon of lemon juice or a little grated zest for the "lemon" flavouring the recipe calls for.
- Browning the topThe recipe says only "a few minutes." At around 350F, 10 to 15 minutes will brown the meringue and also cook it through rather than merely tanning it. Spread the meringue so it touches the pastry rim all round, which helps keep it from shrinking.
- YieldOne deep 9-inch pie, eight servings. Best the day it is made; the meringue turns beady in the refrigerator overnight.
This page belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century American calendar cookbooks that solved the daily question of what to cook by assigning one dish to each date and giving it a nationality, more as a change of scene than as ethnography. The label "Bavarian" here rests on a real family resemblance: south German and Austrian baking is full of apple, raisin and nut fillings scented with cinnamon, and of the thrifty use of dried cake or bread crumbs to soak up fruit juices, as in a Scheiterhaufen or the crumb layer strewn under strudel filling. The meringue lid, beaten with powdered sugar and browned briefly, was a common finish for both pies and puddings in American cookbooks of the period, which is the likely background to the text's shift to calling the dish a pudding mid-recipe. The near-total absence of quantities is typical of the format.