Home › The Principles of Cookery › Batter Pudding, Baked, and Apples
Batter Pudding, Baked, and Apples
Put one pound of apples peeled, quartered, and cored into a well-buttered dish, and throw over them enough sweet batter to fill it. Add a little pounded clove or grated lemon, and bake in a tolerably brisk oven. The apples will rise to the surface. When quite done, but before removing it from the oven, put on some small bits of butter, and sprinkle sugar thickly over the top. Any kind of fruit may be used for these puddings. Time to bake, one hour or more. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A Victorian batter pudding is closer to a sweetened Yorkshire pudding than to a cake: a loose egg-and-milk batter poured over fruit and baked until set. The recipe assumes you already know how to mix "sweet batter," which the book covers elsewhere.
- The batter, since it is not givenThe batter is not given here. A sweet batter of this period might run something like 4 oz plain flour, 2 to 3 eggs, half a pint (10 fl oz) of milk and 1 to 2 oz sugar, beaten smooth and rested. Enough to fill a dish over 1 lb of apples would need roughly that quantity.
- "Tolerably brisk oven"Read this as somewhere around 400°F. Hot enough for the batter to puff and colour, not so hot that it sets before the apples soften.
- The hour is not paddingRaw quartered apples in cold batter genuinely need the full hour; the batter sets long before the fruit is tender. If the top is browning too fast, drop to 375°F rather than pulling it early.
- Why the apples riseThe batter is denser than the fruit and thickens as the egg sets, so the quarters float. Cut the apples no smaller than quarters or they will break up and cloud the batter.
- Choice of appleA firm cooking apple that holds its shape suits this better than a soft one that collapses to sauce. Bramley will fall apart in an hour; Granny Smith, Braeburn or a russet-type apple will not.
- Butter and sugar at the endThe bits of butter and thick sugar go on while the pudding is still in the oven so they melt and glaze rather than sit as a gritty crust. A few minutes is enough.
- Spicing"a little pounded clove" means no more than a pinch of ground clove; a very little will carry the whole dish. "Grated lemon" means grated zest, again sparingly.
- Yield and costSix or seven servings from a dish of this size is generous by modern portions; four to six is realistic. The 8d costing is a period price note, not a modern guide.
Batter puddings belong to the older English tradition in which a pudding was simply a batter or paste cooked with whatever was to hand — under the roasting joint, boiled in a cloth, or, as here, baked in a buttered dish. The same flour-egg-milk mixture unsweetened and set under dripping beef became Yorkshire pudding; sweetened and poured over fruit it became a cheap family dessert, and the French clafoutis works on a closely similar principle. What *Cassell's* gives is a template rather than a fixed dish: the closing line, "any kind of fruit may be used," is the point of the entry.