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Apple Custard Pudding
Take a dozen finely-flavoured apples, peel, core, and boil them with the rind of two lemons, half a pound of sugar, and a cupful of water, until they will pass through a sieve. Let them get cold; then add to them a little butter, and the whites of four eggs well whisked. Beat all together until the mixture is smooth and firm. Turn into a well-buttered dish, and bake in a quick oven. Sift a little sugar over them. They are nice either hot or cold. Time to bake, about half an hour. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost, 1s.
Despite the name there is no milk and no yolk here — this is a baked apple purée lightened with egg white, closer to a soufflé or an apple snow set in the oven. Two things decide whether it rises or weeps: how dry you cook the apples down, and how gently you combine them with the whites.
- Quantities in modern termsA dozen apples is roughly 3 to 4 1/2 lb before peeling and coring, depending on size. Half a pound of sugar is a generous cup of granulated; a cupful of water is about 8 fl oz. The butter is unmeasured — 1 to 2 tablespoons stirred into the warm purée is in keeping.
- Cook the purée dry"Until they will pass through a sieve" means genuinely soft and thick, not merely tender. Keep the lid off for the last stretch so the water drives off; a wet purée will not hold the whites and the pudding will collapse into liquid at the bottom of the dish.
- Lemon rindPare it in strips with a peeler, avoiding the white pith, and fish the strips out before sieving. The sieve of the period would most likely have been a hair sieve pressed with a wooden spoon; a food mill or a few pulses in a processor gives the same result faster.
- Cool it properlyThe instruction to let the apples get cold is not optional. Warm purée cooks the egg white on contact and you lose the lift.
- "Beat all together" — read as foldWhisk the four whites to soft, not stiff, peaks, stir a spoonful into the purée to loosen it, then fold in the rest. Beating the mixture flat, as the wording invites, knocks out the air the pudding depends on.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. High heat sets the outside quickly and gives the puffed top; about 30 minutes, as stated, in a buttered dish of about 1 1/2 to 2 quarts. It will rise and then settle a little as it cools, which is normal.
- Sugar over the topSift it on as the pudding comes out, not before baking, or it dissolves into a syrupy crust.
- Yield and servingSix, as given. Warm it is airy; cold it sets denser and firmer, and takes cream well.
The lesson here is one in what egg whites can do: the same apple marmalade that would fill a tart becomes a light pudding when whisked whites are folded through it and the heat is high. Victorian cookery books used "custard pudding" loosely, and the name here signals a soft baked sweet rather than the specific egg-and-milk mixture the term implies today; without yolks or cream this belongs beside apple snow and the baked "souffle puddings" of the later nineteenth century. The "probable cost, 1s." is a standard feature of Cassell's, which gives cost and quantity for its recipes as a matter of course — a shilling for a pudding to serve six suggests a period when English cooking apples were cheap and seasonally abundant. The insistence on "finely-flavoured" apples matters more than usual, since nothing but sugar and lemon stands between the fruit and the plate.