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APPLE PUDDING, BAKED (another way) (Line a baking-dish with puff)
Line a baking-dish with puff paste, and cover the bottom with sliced pippins, which should be peeled and cored. Mix together, the crumb of a French roll and a pint of thick cream; add eight eggs well beaten, three or four ounces of sugar, nutmeg, and the same weight of candied peel (orange) cut into small pieces. Spread this mixture over the pippins and bake. Serve with sifted sugar over the top. Bake in a moderate oven. Time, three-quarters of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A rich baked custard set over apples in a pastry case — closer to a crustade or a French flan than to what most people now mean by apple pudding. The custard is the part that needs attention.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F (175C). Forty-five minutes at that heat should leave the custard just set with a slight wobble at the centre; if it puffs and cracks it has gone too far and will weep.
- PippinsA general Victorian term for firm, sharp dessert apples rather than one variety. Cox, Braeburn or a russet all work; avoid anything that collapses to sauce, since the fruit must hold its slices under the custard.
- The pint of creamAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml). "Thick cream" in Victorian usage meant the rich cream that rose to the top of the milk; whipping cream at roughly 35 percent fat is the nearest modern match, and double cream will make it very heavy.
- Eight eggs is a lotVictorian eggs generally ran smaller than today's large ones, so eight of them amount to rather less egg than eight modern large ones. Cutting back to about six large eggs for 20 fl oz of cream keeps the custard cream-led rather than closer to a baked egg pudding.
- French roll crumbA small white enriched roll, crumb only, crusts discarded — call it about 2 oz (60 g), or a generous cup of soft crumbs. The quantity is genuinely loose in the original; the crumb is there to stop the custard curdling and to give it body, so err low rather than high.
- Blind-bake the caseThe recipe does not say to, but a wet custard poured onto raw puff paste gives a sodden base. Line the dish, chill it, bake at 400F for 15 minutes with weights, then drop the oven to 350F before filling.
- Candied orange peelThree to four ounces is the same weight as the sugar, so this is a distinctly citrus pudding. Buy peel in whole pieces and dice it yourself; the pre-chopped mixed peel sold in tubs is mostly sugar syrup and will dissolve away.
- ServingSufficient for seven or eight as written. Sift the sugar over once the pudding has cooled a little — on a hot surface it simply melts in. Best warm rather than hot, when the custard has firmed enough to cut cleanly.
Baked puddings of this kind — fruit on the bottom, an egg-and-cream custard thickened with bread over the top, all in a pastry-lined dish — descend from the medieval and Tudor "custarde" or "crustade", where the pastry began life as the container and only gradually became something worth eating. Bread crumb is the older thickener, used in sweet custards before flour and cornflour, and a French roll, being fine-textured and slightly rich, suited this sort of work. Cassell's prints more than one version of apple pudding, and this one sits at the expensive end — a pint of cream, eight eggs and candied peel put the probable cost at 3s 6d, a substantial sum measured against a scullery maid's wages at the time. Once you can set a custard over fruit, the same method carries you to any number of other puddings.