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Apple Pudding, Nottingham
Pare half a dozen good baking apples, remove the cores without dividing the fruit, and in their places put two or three cloves and a little sugar. Place these in a buttered pie-dish, pour over them a light batter, and bake in a moderately hot oven. Time to bake, two hours. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A batter pudding with whole apples baked into it, in the same family as Yorkshire pudding and Sussex pond. The original assumes you already know how to make a batter, and its baking time belongs to a coal range rather than a modern oven.
- The batter is left to youCassell's gives no proportions because a "light batter" was standard knowledge: roughly 4 oz plain flour, 2 eggs and half a pint of milk, beaten smooth and rested. Thinner batter climbs the dish and browns; thicker batter smothers the apples.
- Oven temperature"moderately hot" is usually taken to mean somewhere around 375-400F, though the book gives no equivalents of its own. Batter needs the initial heat to rise, so do not start it low.
- Two hours is far too longTwo hours is longer than a modern oven needs -- at 375-400F the batter sets in about 20 minutes and is cooked through in 45 to 60, by which time whole apples are collapsing. Check at 45 minutes and judge by a set, browned batter and a skewer sliding easily into the fruit.
- ClovesTwo or three whole cloves per apple is assertive by modern taste, and they stay in the finished pudding. One clove each, or a pinch of ground cinnamon, suits most palates better; whichever you use, warn anyone who is eating.
- Choice of apple"Good baking apples" meant a large, sharp cooker. Today that means a Bramley in Britain, or Granny Smith or Northern Spy in America; sweet dessert apples turn watery and sag.
- Coring wholeAn apple corer or a narrow knife worked from the stem end keeps the fruit intact so the sugar stays inside. Sit the apples upright and well apart in the buttered pie-dish so the batter surrounds rather than drowns them.
- Yield and servingFour or five portions, as stated. Serve straight from the dish while the batter is puffed, with cream, custard or a spoonful of the syrup that pools around the fruit.
- Probable costNinepence was a genuine selling point in a book aimed at households counting pennies; it tells you the dish was built on apples, flour and milk rather than butter and eggs in quantity.
Batter puddings of this kind were among the cheapest sweet dishes in a Victorian kitchen: a little flour, milk and egg turned a few apples into a meal's end for five people. Regional names attached themselves freely to such puddings, and the origin of "Nottingham" here is simply undocumented; the same construction appears elsewhere under other county names. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades afterwards, catalogued these variations side by side with costings in pence, which is why the entry reads more like a reference note than a set of instructions. It assumes a cook who can make batter without being told and who needs to know only what goes into the dish and what it will cost.