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Apple Pudding
One layer of apple sauce sweetened, one layer bread crumbs, then some small pieces of butter and a little cinnamon sprinkled over it, and so on until your pudding dish is full of layers alternately, pour over it one cup milk, bake half an hour, serve with sweetened cream or boiled custard.
A layered brown betty in all but name, and one of those recipes that assumes you already have applesauce and stale bread on hand. A few unstated details are worth pinning down.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as is usual in books of this kind. Half an hour suggests something in the moderate range, around 350F, which should be enough to set the milk and crisp the top layer without drying the interior.
- Bread crumbs means dry crumbsCrumbs of this period were generally made from stale bread grated or rubbed through a sieve, rather than the soft fresh crumbs of a modern food processor. Coarse dry crumbs hold their structure better between the apple layers; fresh soft ones tend to collapse.
- Finish with crumbs, not appleThe instruction to build "until your pudding dish is full" leaves the top layer unspecified. End on crumbs and butter so the surface browns; a top layer of sauce simply bakes to leather.
- The milkOne cup is poured over the whole assembly at the end, so it must have crumb layers to soak into. Pour it slowly around the edges rather than in one spot, or the middle will be sodden and the sides dry.
- SweeteningNineteenth-century applesauce was often barely sweet, sometimes not at all, hence "sweetened." Taste the sauce first; a modern jarred sauce may need no sugar, and the cinnamon and buttered crumbs carry a good deal of the flavor.
- Butter quantity"Some small pieces" is genuinely open. Two to three tablespoons total, dotted across the layers of a standard 1.5-quart dish, is in keeping with the style; more makes it rich rather than wrong.
- YieldNo dish size or yield is given. Assuming a 1.5-quart dish, expect about six modest servings. It is best warm, within an hour of baking, as the crumb layers soften as it stands.
- The saucesBoiled custard is a stirred stovetop custard, closer to what is now sold as creme anglaise than to anything baked. Sweetened cream is simply cream with sugar stirred in, poured over unwhipped.
Puddings built from alternating layers of fruit and buttered crumbs run through American and English household cookery in the nineteenth century, appearing under names like brown betty, apple charlotte and, as here, plain apple pudding. The logic is thrift: stale bread and windfall apples were the two things a household reliably had too much of, and butter and cinnamon made them into a dessert. Books of this kind assume a good deal of their readers, which is why the recipe takes for granted that a jar of applesauce already stands in the pantry and gives no dish size, no oven setting and no yield. The accompaniment of boiled custard or sweetened cream does real work here against a dry baked pudding.