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Nottingham Pudding
Take half a dozen large apples of uniform size. Pare and core without breaking them and fill the centre of each with a little butter, some moist sugar, and grated nutmeg. Put them side by side in a well-buttered pie-dish, and cover them with a light batter made as follows. Mix six table-spoonfuls of flour very smoothly with a little cold water, add three well-beaten eggs, a pinch of salt, and milk sufficient to make the batter of the consistency of thick cream. This will be about three-quarters of a pint. Bake the pudding in a moderate oven. The batter will be better if made an hour or two before it is wanted. Time to bake, a hour and a half. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
NOTTINGHAM PUDDING (another way). (See APPLE PUDDING, NOTTINGHAM.)
A batter pudding built around whole baked apples, and the two things that decide whether it works are the apple variety and the depth of the dish.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F (180C). The pudding needs steady heat: too hot and the batter domes and browns before the apples soften, too cool and it stays pallid and eggy.
- Choose apples that hold their shapeA Bramley or other true cooking apple will burst and dissolve into the batter, which defeats the point of six neat filled apples. Use a firm dessert-cooking apple such as Braeburn, Golden Delicious or Northern Spy, and pick them small enough that six sit side by side without crowding.
- Coring without breakingAn apple corer pushed from the stem end and twisted out leaves a clean tunnel; leave about half an inch of flesh at the base so the butter and sugar do not run straight out into the dish.
- Three-quarters of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 15 fl oz / about 1 3/4 US cups. The recipe is ambiguous as to whether that figure covers the milk alone or the finished batter, so add the milk by eye until the mixture matches thick cream.
- Six tablespoonfuls of flourVictorian tablespoons were generally larger than the modern 15 ml spoon, though sizes were not standardised. Weigh instead: somewhere in the region of 2-3 oz / 55-85 g of plain flour, then adjust with milk until the batter is the thickness of double cream, which is the description the recipe actually asks you to match.
- Moist sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar. Light brown sugar is the closest thing on a modern shelf; caster sugar will work but loses the faint molasses note.
- Resting the batterThe hour or two of rest is not decoration. It hydrates the flour and relaxes the gluten, giving a lighter set and less shrinking at the edges.
- Dish and timingUse a buttered deep pie dish or a 9-inch square baking dish so the batter comes at least two-thirds up the apples. An hour and a half is long by modern standards; start checking at 50 minutes. The pudding is done when the batter is set and risen around the fruit and a skewer slides into an apple without resistance.
- ServingSix portions, one apple each, and it wants pouring cream or a thin custard. Serve it straight from the dish, as the batter sinks as it cools.
Nottingham pudding belongs to the large English family of batter puddings, the same flour-egg-milk mixture that goes under beef as Yorkshire pudding but here poured sweet over fruit, the closest French cousin being the cherry clafoutis. Why Nottingham in particular is not documented; the place name attached to the dish in nineteenth-century cookery books much as Bakewell, Sussex and Kentish did to other puddings. Cassell's includes it in an era when apples were the cheapest winter fruit in the English kitchen and a batter or suet crust was the standard way of turning a few of them into a dinner for six; the "probable cost, 9d" suggests that the price of a pudding was something Cassell's readers were expected to weigh.