Peel and chop apples; mix with ½ cup of nuts, raisins, the juice and rind of ½ lemon and 1 tablespoonful of brandy. Then add the yolks of 4 eggs and the whites beaten to a stiff froth. Let bake in a moderate oven until done. Serve cold.
August 18 — No. 18
Dutch
A compact baked apple custard with no flour, no sugar and no stated quantities for the fruit — typical of the terse calendar-cookbook style. A few decisions are left entirely to the cook.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe recipe says only "add" the stiffly beaten whites, but there is no flour and no crumb, so the whites and the setting yolks are all that hold the dish together. Fold them into the apple and yolk mixture with a light hand and get it into the oven at once.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. Bake in a buttered dish until the centre is set and no longer wobbles when nudged — roughly 40 to 50 minutes for a 1½-quart dish, longer if the apples are very juicy.
- Apple quantity is not givenThe original never says how many apples, and there is no way to recover the figure. For four egg yolks and four whites, about 2 lb of apples (5 or 6 medium) fills a 1½-quart dish sensibly; less than that and you are eating baked eggs.
- No sugar is listedThis is deliberate in some period puddings, but with tart cooking apples the result is austere. If your apples are sharp, sweeten to taste; if they are modern dessert apples such as Gala or Fuji, they may need nothing.
- Chop, do not slice"Chop" here means small dice, not wedges. Large slices release water in pockets and the custard around them stays loose.
- Nuts and raisinsThe recipe does not say which nuts; walnuts or almonds are the likely candidates. Toast them first, since they get no browning inside the custard. Plump the raisins in hot water or a little extra brandy so they do not draw moisture from the apples.
- Serve cold, and mean itThe pudding firms considerably as it cools and slices much better after two or three hours. Chilled overnight it becomes dense; a few hours at room temperature is the better reading of the instruction.
- YieldFour to six servings. The recipe gives no sauce; cream, poured or whipped, is a plausible accompaniment.
This comes from the "a dish a day" format: a calendar cookbook assigning each date a dish, here with a nationality attached, so the household cook could open the book on August 18 and not have to decide anything. The nationalities in such books tend to be loose labels rather than researched attributions — and in American usage "Dutch" was often a blurred inheritance from *Deutsch* and Pennsylvania German cooking. What is characteristic of the type is the construction: a flourless baked pudding leaning on beaten egg whites, and the single tablespoon of brandy used as flavouring.