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Apple (swiss) Pudding
Butter a deep pie-dish. Fill it with alternate layers of apples sliced, sweetened, and flavoured, and rusks which have been soaked in milk and beaten with a fork. Let the rusks be at the top and the bottom. Pour melted butter over the whole, and bake until nicely browned. Serve with sifted sugar. Time to bake, forty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A layered apple and rusk pudding of the charlotte family, vague by design — the original assumes you know what a rusk is and how much butter a pie-dish will take. The hinge is the rusks: they must be soaked soft and mashed, not left as dry biscuit, or the pudding bakes into hard seams.
- RusksVictorian rusks were twice-baked, lightly sweet bread biscuits, drier and plainer than a modern Dutch beschuit but close enough. Zwieback, Dutch rusks or plain dried bread slices all work; allow about 6 to 8 rusks for a deep pie dish, soaked in enough milk to absorb (roughly 1 cup) until they collapse under a fork.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book assumes a coal range and leaves the judgement to the cook. Forty minutes to a good brown suggests something in the region of 350-375F, though this is inference rather than anything the recipe states. Cover loosely with foil if the top rusk layer colours before the apples soften.
- ApplesUse a cooking apple that breaks down — Bramley, Granny Smith, or any tart firm apple. About 1½ lb peeled and sliced thin fills a deep dish; sliced thick, they will still be crunchy at forty minutes.
- "Sweetened and flavoured"Around 1/2 cup sugar for 1.5 lb tart apples, with lemon zest, cinnamon or a grating of nutmeg. This entry leaves the sweetening and flavouring to the cook's discretion rather than specifying.
- Melted butterTwo to three ounces (4–6 tbsp) poured over the assembled dish is enough to gild the top rusks and enrich the layers. Much more and the pudding turns greasy at the base.
- DishA "deep pie-dish" is an oval or round earthenware baking dish; something in the region of 2 pints, or about a 1-quart baking dish, is the nearest modern equivalent for four or five servings. Butter it generously; the sugar will catch at the edges.
- ServingFour or five portions, hot, with sifted sugar over the top. Cream or a thin custard is a reasonable addition and would not have surprised the original cook.
- Cost"Probable cost, 1s." is one shilling, a figure Cassell's gives throughout to help a housekeeper budget. It is of historical interest only.
This is a thrift pudding in the charlotte tradition: fruit layered with soaked bread or biscuit, buttered, and baked until the top crisps. The "Swiss" label is often said to have attached loosely in nineteenth-century English cookery to puddings built from rusks or sponge rather than pastry, much as "Swiss roll" is traditionally held to have come to mean a rolled sponge — on this account a name of fashion rather than provenance, and not evidence of any Swiss original. Rusks themselves were a staple of the Victorian larder, twice-baked so they would keep for weeks. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households at the end of the century, gives each entry a probable cost and a number of persons served, which tells you as much about its readers as the recipe does: a cook working to a fixed weekly sum, turning bread and windfall apples into a dish worth bringing to table.