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March Pudding
One cup dried apples, cup molasses, one and one-fourths cup flour, fourth cup butter, one egg, one tea-spoon each of soda and cinnamon, half tea-spoon cloves; wash and soak apples over night, cut fine and mix with water in which they were soaked, add molasses and spice; mix egg, butter and flour together; stir soda with apples and molasses; add and bake immediately; serve hot with sauce made of half cup butter and one cup sugar, beaten smooth and flavored with nutmeg, lemon or vanilla. - Miss Lizzie March.
A late-winter molasses and dried-apple pudding of the plain baked-batter type, with a creamed butter-and-sugar hard sauce. Two things need attention before you start: the leavening is fast, and the liquid quantity is left to your judgment.
- Work fast once the soda goes inThe soda reacts immediately with the acid in the molasses, and the instruction to "add and bake immediately" is the hinge of the recipe. Have the pan greased and the oven hot before you combine the two mixtures, or the rise will be spent on the counter.
- The soaking water is unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity for the water the apples soak in, and this genuinely cannot be converted. Cover the cup of dried apples with water overnight, then use the drained liquid — expect roughly half a cup — and judge by consistency: a thick, spoonable batter, not a pourable one.
- Oven and panBake at 350F in a greased 8-inch square pan or a 1 1/2-quart dish, 40 to 50 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. The molasses browns fast, so tent with foil if the top darkens before the center sets.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is more bitter and stronger-flavored than what a nineteenth-century kitchen usually meant by molasses, and it will give a harsher result.
- SaltThe recipe calls for no salt, and butter in a household kitchen of this period was commonly salted. If you use unsalted butter, add a quarter teaspoon of salt to the flour.
- Dried applesSupermarket dried apple rings work; unsulphured dried apples give a darker, more concentrated flavor closer to the home-dried fruit intended here. Chop them small after soaking — large pieces stay chewy against the soft crumb.
- The sauceHalf a cup of butter beaten smooth with a cup of sugar is a hard sauce, not a pouring sauce. Cream it at room temperature until the sugar no longer feels gritty, flavor it, and chill briefly; it melts into the hot pudding at the table.
- YieldServes six to eight in the small portions the sauce implies. It reheats well, covered, at 300F.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was assembled from recipes sent in by named contributors, which is why this one carries Miss Lizzie March's signature, as with the book's many Mrs. So-and-so cakes. Whatever the source of the name, a dried-apple pudding suits late winter: by then the barrel apples were gone or sprouting, and what remained of the autumn crop was the sliced fruit that had been dried and put by. Molasses, soda and a spoonful of spice do the sweetening and leavening here, and the accompanying hard sauce lavored with whatever the household had, was a common finish for plain steamed or baked puddings.