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Apple Pudding, Boiled
Make a light batter with two eggs, four heaped table-spoonfuls of flour, a little salt, and a large breakfast-cupful of milk. Beat it well, then stir into it a few apples pared, cored, and sliced. Put all together into a well-oiled mould, tie it in a floured cloth, and boil for an hour and a half. Serve with sweet sauce. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for six persons.
A boiled batter pudding of the plainest sort: Yorkshire pudding batter with apples in it, cooked in a covered mould rather than a hot oven. The proportions are sound, but the Victorian shorthand needs unpacking.
- The measurements, in modern termsFour heaped tablespoons of flour is conventionally reckoned at about 3-4 oz (85-115 g); a large breakfast-cupful of milk is somewhere around 10 fl oz (300 ml). With two eggs that gives a thin pouring batter.
- How many applesThe original never says. Two or three medium cooking apples — about 12 oz (350 g) prepared weight — is as much as this quantity of batter will carry without collapsing into a wet mass.
- There is no sugar in itThe pudding is deliberately plain and relies entirely on the sweet sauce. If you would rather not, two tablespoons of sugar in the batter will not harm it.
- Mould and clothA 2-pint (1.2 litre) pudding basin, well greased. The floured cloth was the Victorian lid; a pleated round of baking parchment under pleated foil, tied under the rim with string and a loop for lifting, does the same work and does not need scalding and flouring first.
- Boil or steamSet the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan and keep the water at least halfway up the sides, topping up from a kettle so it never goes off the boil. A dry pan will crack the basin and stop the cooking.
- The time is rightAn hour and a half is not excessive for a batter pudding of this size — batter sets slowly in gentle steam heat. Test with a skewer through the centre; it should come out clean and the pudding should feel springy, not liquid.
- Sweet sauceIn Cassell's this generally means a simple sweet white sauce or a melted-butter sauce with sugar and a flavouring such as lemon or brandy. Pouring custard is the usual modern substitute.
- YieldSix is optimistic by present-day appetites unless it follows a full dinner. Four is more realistic as a pudding on its own.
Boiled batter puddings belong to the era before every kitchen had a reliable oven, when the pot on the fire did most of the work and a pudding cloth or a covered mould was the standard vessel. The same batter baked under a joint became Yorkshire pudding; boiled in a cloth with fruit stirred through it, it became a cheap sweet course, and versions with apples, damsons, cherries or currants appear across nineteenth-century English cookery books. The costing here — eightpence for six people — is the point of the entry as much as the method: Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was aimed at middle-class households running to a budget, and it prices nearly everything, so a cook could see at a glance what a dish would take out of the week's money.