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Agnew Pudding
Pare and core eight russets, and boil them to a pulp with the rind of half a lemon. Beat up the yolks of three eggs, and add to them three ounces of melted butter; sweeten to taste, and beat all together. Line a pudding-dish with puff paste, pour in the mixture, and bake until it becomes a light brown colour. Time to bake, thirty minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four persons.
A shallow apple-and-butter custard in a puff paste case, closer to an open tart than to what modern cooks call a pudding. The whole thing depends on getting the apple pulp dry.
- RussetsRussets are dry, firm, slightly nutty dessert apples that keep well through winter. Golden Russet or Egremont Russet if you can find them; otherwise Braeburn, Jonagold or Cox. Avoid Bramley or other cooking apples, which fall to a wet froth and will slacken the filling.
- Boil them to a pulpUse only two or three tablespoons of water in a covered pan, then uncover and cook off the moisture until the pulp mounds on the spoon. This is the hinge of the recipe: a watery purée will not set with three yolks and will soak the pastry from below.
- The lemon rindPare it in wide strips with no white pith and lift it out before mixing, or grate the zest of half a lemon and leave it in. The recipe does not say whether the rind is removed.
- Cooling before the eggsLet the pulp drop to warm rather than hot before beating in the yolks and melted butter, or the eggs will set in threads.
- Sweeten to tasteAbout 3 oz (75 g) caster sugar suits eight apples; russets are sweeter than cookers, so taste the pulp first.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the original assumed a coal range. Bake at 400F (200C) so the puff paste rises and colours in the thirty minutes stated; set the dish on a preheated baking sheet to firm the base.
- Dish and yieldAn 8 to 9 inch pie plate or shallow pudding dish. Four servings, warm, with cream.
- Probable cost, 8dEightpence in late Victorian money, listed as a matter of course throughout Cassell's for households budgeting to the penny. It has no useful modern equivalent.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery ran to several thousand entries arranged alphabetically, which is why an obscure pudding named for somebody sits between technical notes on principles of cookery; the compilers gathered names wherever they found them, from household manuscripts, contributors and earlier printed books, and rarely explained them. "Agnew" is a Scottish and Ulster surname, and the dish is generally assumed to be a family or contributor's name rather than a place, though the book offers no attribution. The construction itself appears to be older than the title: a sweetened apple pur doubtedly e enriched with butter and egg yolks and baked in pastry belongs to the long-established family of English buttered tarts and puddings. The specification of russets matters more than the name — they were a winter keeping apple of the English orchard, still sound in the fruit loft in February when nothing else was, and their dry flesh is what allows a filling this lightly bound to set at all.