Home › The Principles of Cookery › APPLE PUDDING, BAKED (another way) (Put a dozen apples into)
APPLE PUDDING, BAKED (another way) (Put a dozen apples into)
Put a dozen apples into a saucepan with enough water to keep them from burning, a piece of butter, a little powdered cinnamon, and sugar according to taste. Let them simmer gently until they fall, then beat them well. Place them in the middle of a pie-dish, and pour round and over them a good thick arrowroot custard. Put into a quick oven, and bake until brown. Time to brown, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A simple baked apple pudding: sweetened apple pulp under a thick arrowroot custard, browned quickly. The only real technical demand is the custard, which the original assumes you already know how to make.
- "A quick oven"Read this as a hot oven, roughly 400-425F. The filling needs no further cooking; the heat is only there to set and colour the top in the twenty minutes given.
- Arrowroot custardThe original assumes you know the method and gives no quantities. A workable reconstruction is about 1 pint milk, 1 tbsp arrowroot slaked in a little cold milk and sugar to taste, cooked to a coating thickness; eggs are optional and not mentioned here. The starch helps the custard stand up to oven heat, so do not leave it out.
- A dozen applesKitchen apples of the period were often on the small side, so aim for about 3 lb of a variety that collapses when cooked; four or five large Bramleys will do. Dessert apples hold their shape and give you chunks rather than pulp.
- "Until they fall"The apples should break down entirely into a rough purée — 15 to 25 minutes covered over low heat. Only a few spoonfuls of water are needed; too much and the pulp is loose and will bleed into the custard.
- Beat them wellBeat the hot pulp smooth and, if it looks wet, let it cook uncovered for a few minutes to drive off moisture. A stiff purée holds its dome in the centre of the dish, which is the whole visual point of the pudding.
- Pie-dishAn oval or round earthenware baking dish of about 1.5 quarts, not a pie plate with pastry. Nothing is lined or covered.
- Probable cost1s. 6d. is a price from the 1870s-90s British market and has no useful modern equivalent; it is there so a housekeeper could compare dishes against each other.
- YieldFive or six servings as written. Warm rather than piping hot suits it, though the original says nothing about serving temperature.
Cassell's gives several apple puddings in succession, and this is one of a family of dishes in which a cooked fruit purée is dressed with something pale and set over it. The distinguishing ingredient here is arrowroot, a starch from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea, imported chiefly from St Vincent and much prized in nineteenth-century kitchens because it thickened clear and bland and was thought gentle enough for invalids and children. It was commonly recommended where a custard or sauce had to take heat or stand without curdling, and its presence in a nursery-friendly baked pudding like this is unsurprising. The instruction to reckon cost and servings reflects the book's purpose: Cassell's was aimed at middle-class households running on a budget, where knowing that a dish fed six for eighteen pence mattered as much as knowing how to make it.