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Amber Pudding
Peel, core, and quarter 8 apples. Put 3 tablespoons Crisco in a pan, when warm add apples, 3 tablespoons sugar, grated rind 1 lemon, and stew slowly till soft, then rub through a sieve. Add yolks of 3 eggs, and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon. Roll out Crisco pastry thinly, cut off a strip and press it on to the edge of a wet pudding dish. Put apple mixture into dish and bake for 30 minutes in a hot oven. Beat up whites of eggs with 1/2 teaspoon salt, to stiff froth, add 2 teaspoons sugar and 2 drops vanilla. Heap this meringue all over apple mixture. Dust with sugar and place here and there a glace cherry. Replace in oven to brown slightly.
A Crisco-era apple curd baked in a dish edged with pastry rather than lined with it. The whole thing hinges on getting the apple purée thick before the yolks go in.
- Reduce the purée firstStewed apple sieved straight into yolks will weep and soak the pastry band. Cook the apples uncovered until they hold a mound on the spoon, then sieve, cool to warm, and stir in the yolks.
- Hot oven"hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. That is fine for setting the pastry edge, but it is worth dropping to about 350F after the first 10 minutes so the yolk-thickened apple does not curdle at the rim before the centre sets.
- Browning the meringueThe recipe only says to return it to the oven to brown slightly. Rather than a short blast at high heat, about 325-350F for 12-15 minutes will take the peaks to pale gold and set the meringue through.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this was written and the book exists to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works, or use butter in both the pastry and the apples for better flavour.
- The pastry stripThere is no bottom crust. You are pressing a thin band of pastry onto the wetted rim of the dish, the way a traditional English pie is collared, so it bakes crisp above the filling.
- ApplesEight apples is roughly 2 1/2 lb; use a variety that breaks down, such as Bramley or McIntosh. With only 3 tablespoons of sugar the purée will be sharp, which is the point against the sweet meringue.
- Salt in the whitesHalf a teaspoon of salt in three whites is heavy by modern standards and salt slows the foam. A pinch is enough, and adding the sugar a spoonful at a time once soft peaks form gives a more stable meringue.
- SievingA food mill or a coarse sieve gives the right slightly grainy texture; a blender makes it gluey.
- YieldServes six in a shallow 8- to 9-inch dish. Best eaten the day it is made, as the meringue softens overnight.
Amber pudding is an old English name, often said to have been applied to any baked pudding with the deep gold colour that egg yolks and cooked apple or candied peel produce; eighteenth-century versions used marrow, candied orange and a good deal more sugar. By the time it turned up in a Crisco advertising cookbook, the dish had been reduced to an apple curd under meringue, and the recipe's real job was to demonstrate that the new hydrogenated shortening could stew fruit and make pastry as well as butter or lard. The glacé was a period signature: cheap and brilliantly coloured.