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Apple Pudding, Baked
Pare, quarter, and core three pounds of good baking apples; put them in a saucepan with six ounces of sugar and half a cupful of water, and the rind and juice of a lemon. Boil them gently until they are quite soft. Turn them out of the saucepan, and put them aside to cool. Butter the inside of a shallow pie-dish, and line it throughout with good ordinary pie-crust. Add to the apple pulp two or three well-beaten eggs, and put the mixture into the dish. Make the top smooth, and grate a little nutmeg over it. Bake in a quick oven. This pudding may be served either hot or cold. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for six persons.
A lidless apple custard tart rather than a pudding in the modern sense: cooked apple pulp bound with egg, baked in a lined dish. Nearly everything hinges on temperature control.
- Cool the pulp before the eggs go inIf the apple is still hot the eggs scramble on contact and the filling turns granular. The recipe says to set it aside to cool and means it — bring it to at least lukewarm, ideally cold.
- "Quick oven" needs qualifyingA quick oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 400–450F. That heat sets the pastry, but three-quarters of an hour at the top of that range risks curdling an egg-bound filling; starting hot for the first 15 minutes and then dropping to about 350F is the safer modern course.
- Weights and measuresSix ounces of sugar is a scant cup of granulated. Three pounds of apples is roughly six large ones, and should yield something like 4 cups of pulp. Half a cupful of water is all that is wanted — the apples release plenty of their own.
- Choice of apple"Good baking apples" is best read as a variety that collapses: Bramley, or in North America a mix of McIntosh and Granny Smith. A firm dessert apple will stay in pieces and the filling will not bind.
- The lemon rindPare it in strips with a peeler and remove the strips before mashing, or grate it finely. Chunks of rind boiled with the fruit go tough and bitter.
- "Line it throughout"There is no top crust; the pastry lines base and sides only. A shallow dish of around 9 inches will suit. Blind-baking the shell for 10 minutes may help, since the wet filling has no lid to protect it.
- SweetnessSix ounces of sugar to three pounds of apples is restrained by modern standards, and many of the cooking apples of the period were markedly sharp. Taste the pulp when it comes off the heat and adjust before the eggs go in.
- YieldSix servings, as stated. The "probable cost, 1s. 6d." is a period price note, not an instruction.
This sits among a long run of apple puddings — boiled, steamed, baked, in batter, in crust — reflecting the place of the apple in the British domestic year: cheap, storable through winter, and productive of many dishes from one sack. The word "pudding" here carries its older, looser English sense of almost any substantial sweet or savoury dish set in a dish or cloth, which is why something a modern cook would call a custard tart sits under the same heading as a boiled suet roll. The egg-bound apple filling belongs to a family of "apple custards" found in nineteenth-century cookery books, where beaten eggs were a common way to give cooked fruit body enough to slice. Serving it hot or cold at the cook's discretion suited a household where a baked dish might reappear at supper.