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Apple Cake Pudding
Take three pounds of finely-flavoured baking apples, and boil them to a pulp with the rind of two lemons, a cupful of water, and eight ounces of sugar. Beat them well, and mix with them gradually, six good-sized potatoes, boiled and crushed quite small. Then add three or four well-whisked eggs, pour into a buttered mould, and boil quickly. Serve with sweet sauce. Time to boil, one hour and a half. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost, 1s. 2d.
A Victorian boiled pudding built on apple pulp and mashed potato rather than flour or breadcrumbs. It works, but two of the instructions need translating before you start.
- "Boil quickly" means in a water bathThe buttered mould goes into a pan of already-boiling water, covered, with the water kept at a steady rolling boil for the full hour and a half. Modern practice is to steam it instead, which gives the same result with far less risk of water getting in: stand the covered mould on a trivet in a deep pan, water halfway up the sides, lid on, topped up with boiling water as it drops.
- Cover the mould properlyThe recipe assumes you know to tie a floured cloth or buttered paper over the top. Use a double layer of buttered foil or paper pleated across the middle and tied with string under the rim, or the pudding will take on water and collapse.
- The lemon rind comes outThe lemon rind — The recipe boils the rind of two lemons with the apples but never says whether it is taken out. If you pare it off in wide strips with a peeler, leaving the white pith behind, you can fish it out before beating the pulp.
- Potatoes as the binderSix good-sized potatoes is very roughly 1.5 to 3 lb before cooking, depending on how large you take 'good-sized' to be. Use a floury variety — Maris Piper, russet — boiled, drained very dry and pressed through a ricer or sieve. Anything waxy, or anything mashed with a beater, turns gluey and the pudding goes heavy.
- Cool before the eggs go inThe apple and potato mixture must be no more than warm when you beat in the three or four whisked eggs, or they will scramble in streaks. The eggs are the only setting agent here; there is no flour.
- ApplesThree pounds of a cooking apple that breaks down — Bramley, or a tart windfall type. Eating apples hold their shape and will not give you the pulp the recipe depends on. Eight ounces of sugar is right for Bramleys; reduce it if your apples are mild.
- "Sweet sauce"A general term for a sweet pudding sauce: a pouring custard, or melted butter beaten with sugar and a little sherry or lemon. Either suits it.
- Yield and costSix servings, as stated. The 1s. 2d. is late-nineteenth-century pricing; at roughly 2½d. a head it was an inexpensive pudding, with potato standing in for suet and flour.
Boiled puddings tied in a cloth or set in a mould were the backbone of English domestic cookery for centuries, and by the time Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled in the 1870s the genre had spread far beyond suet and flour. This one belongs to a family of frugal recipes that use cooked potato as a binder and bulking agent — a technique that appears in British and Irish kitchens across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in everything from potato pastry to potato cakes and "potato pudding" proper. The appeal was straightforward economy: potatoes were cheap and constant, and a pudding built on them cost a fraction of one made with eggs, butter and wheat flour. The lemon rind and the whisked eggs are the small gestures toward refinement that lift it out of pure thrift, the aim being less novelty than showing a household how to put a hot sweet dish on the table from what was already in the store cupboard.