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Bird's-Nest Pudding
Pare and core without quartering enough quick-cooking tart apples to fill a pudding-pan; make a custard of one quart milk and the yolks of six eggs; sweeten, spice, pour over apples, and bake; when done, use the whites of eggs beaten stiff with six table-spoons white sugar; spread on the custard, brown lightly, and serve either hot or cold. If necessary, apples may be baked a short time before adding custard.
A baked apple custard under a meringue lid. The only real difficulty is that apples and custard cook at different rates, and the original acknowledges this in its last sentence.
- Bake the apples firstThe original allows for this: "If necessary, apples may be baked a short time before adding custard." Whole cored apples can need 25-40 minutes to soften, longer than a custard will tolerate, so give them a head start at 350F until a skewer meets less resistance, then pour the custard around them and continue.
- Oven temperatureBuckeye Cookery assumes a wood range and gives no number. Custard wants 325-350F; above that the eggs tighten and squeeze out liquid. The custard is set when a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean and the centre still trembles, roughly 170-175F.
- The pudding-panA shallow earthenware or glass dish of about 2 to 2 1/2 quarts, deep enough that the custard comes most of the way up the apples. A water bath is not called for here but will give a smoother set if your oven runs hot.
- Sweeten and spiceNo quantities are given. For a quart of milk and six yolks, 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar is right, with grated nutmeg or cinnamon; a strip of lemon peel warmed in the milk suits tart apples.
- Apple choice"Quick-cooking tart" probably points to varieties that soften quickly. Rhode Island Greening or Bramley collapse readily; Northern Spy softens well but holds its shape more than those; Granny Smith works but is stubborn. Sweet, waxy modern eating apples are a poor fit.
- The meringueThe whites are beaten stiff, but at only one tablespoon of sugar per white this is a leaner, less stable meringue than a modern pie topping. Spread it to the edges of the dish so it seals, and brown for 8-10 minutes at 350F, or 3-4 minutes at 425F if the pudding is already cooked and hot.
- MilkNineteenth-century milk was unhomogenised and often richer than today's standardised whole milk. Substituting a cup of the quart with cream gives a closer texture.
- Yield and servingSix to eight servings, one apple each. Serve warm the day it is made; the meringue weeps in the refrigerator overnight even though the recipe allows it cold.
"Bird's-nest pudding" is a name American cookbooks used through the nineteenth century for two rather different things: apples baked whole in custard, and a rice or tapioca pudding shaped around fruit. The name is often said to come from the way the fruit sits in the set custard like eggs in a nest, though this explanation is traditional rather than documented. Lydia Maria Child gives an early version in The Frugal Housewife (1829), the book later retitled The American Frugal Housewife. Its appearance in Buckeye Cookery (first published 1876 in Marysville, Ohio) reflects a household economy in which apples and eggs were both abundant and cheap in autumn: a quart of milk and six eggs feed a table with no butter, no wheat flour and very little sugar. The meringue top is the one flourish, and it exists partly because the six whites left over from the custard would otherwise have gone to waste.