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Birds Nest Pudding
Pare whole apples: take out the cores, sprinkle sugar over them and steam until a little tender, then place them in a pudding dish and pour over them a batter made of eight eggs, one quart and one pint milk, one pint flour, one teaspoonful creamtarter, one half teaspoon soda. The batter should almost cover the apples, use as many apples as you please. If the apples are pretty large, halve them; to be eaten with rich foaming sauce.
A New England apple pudding built on a thin, eggy batter closer to a clafoutis than to a cake. The original assumes the cook knows the dish is baked, which it never actually says.
- The missing instructionThe recipe never says to bake it, but baked it must be: figure roughly 45 to 60 minutes in a moderate oven (around 350F), until the custard is set in the centre and puffed and browned at the edges. Neither the temperature nor the timing comes from the original — they are a modern reconstruction. The period text simply assumed a reader who knew the dish went into the oven.
- Measure the liquid carefully"One quart and one pint milk" is 6 cups; "one pint flour" is about 2 cups by volume, near 9 oz by weight. That is a very loose batter by modern standards, and it is meant to be: it sets into a soft custard rather than a crumb.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon of soda is the period equivalent of roughly two teaspoons of modern baking powder. Mix the dry ingredients and get the pudding into the oven promptly, since the reaction begins on contact with the liquid.
- Choose a firm appleSteaming is only meant to take the raw hardness out — the apples finish cooking in the batter. Use a variety that holds its shape, such as Braeburn, Granny Smith or Northern Spy. Softer supermarket apples collapse into the custard.
- Vessel and yieldEight eggs and 6 cups of milk fill a large deep dish; a 9x13 pan or a 4-quart baking dish is the minimum, and it will serve ten to twelve. Halving the whole recipe is straightforward if the apples are halved as suggested.
- Baking dish depthThe batter should come almost to the tops of the apples, so the fruit browns while the custard sets. A shallow pan leaves the apples dry and the batter overcooked; too deep and the centre never sets.
- "Rich foaming sauce"This means the whipped sugar-butter-and-egg sauce of the period, beaten until frothy and sometimes flavoured with wine or nutmeg. Any warm custard sauce or hard sauce serves the same purpose — the pudding itself is barely sweetened.
Bird's nest pudding was a standard of nineteenth-century American household cookery, appearing under that name and as "crow's nest pudding" in New England receipt books through the 1800s. The name is usually explained by the look of the finished dish: cored apples sitting in the batter, each hollow filled with sugar and syrup like a nest. It is often said to belong to the large family of English batter puddings carried into American kitchens, though the lineage is more inference than documented fact.