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Wilberforce Pudding
Make a batter the same as for a batter pudding. Butter a baking-dish, put in the batter; take some apples, rub them clean with a cloth, take out the stalks and blossoms, but do not pare them or take out the cores. Put them in the batter, and bake in a quick oven. If the apples are pared before they are put in the pudding they mash among the batter as soon as they are hot, and make the pudding soft; but when baked whole the pudding is light, and eats very well. Use butter and sugar for sauce.
A batter pudding with whole apples set into it, closer to a clafoutis than to anything baked in a crust. The recipe assumes you already know Cassell's batter pudding, so the proportions have to be supplied.
- The batterA batter pudding of this period runs roughly 4 oz (about 1 cup) plain flour, 2-3 eggs and 1 pint (2 cups) milk, with a pinch of salt, beaten smooth and rested half an hour; proportions vary considerably from book to book. It should pour like thin cream; a thick batter will not rise around the fruit.
- Quick oven425-450F. The high heat is what makes the batter puff and set rather than stew; a moderate oven gives a heavy, damp pudding. Butter the dish generously and get it hot before the batter goes in.
- Why the apples stay wholeThis is the hinge of the recipe and the author explains it himself. Pared apples collapse into the batter and waterlog it; skin-on whole apples hold their shape and release steam slowly, so the batter cooks through and stays light.
- The coresThe recipe leaves the cores in. If that seems unreasonable at your table, core the apples from the top without cutting through the base and leave the skin intact, which preserves most of the structural point.
- Choice of appleUse a firm cooking or dessert apple that holds its shape. A Bramley or other collapsing cooker will burst its skin and flood the batter, which is exactly what the recipe is trying to avoid.
- TimingNone is given. Reckon on 45-55 minutes for medium apples in a 2-pint dish, until the batter is browned and firm at the centre and a skewer meets no resistance in the fruit.
- The sauce'Butter and sugar' is left unexplained. It may mean no more than melted butter with sugar, or a creamed hard sauce of butter with an equal weight of caster or soft brown sugar, served cold so it melts over the hot pudding.
- YieldAllow one apple per person, in a dish large enough to hold the fruit with batter around it. Serve at once; batter puddings sink and toughen as they cool.
Batter puddings baked with whole fruit were a staple of English domestic cookery long before Cassell's, and this one belongs to the same family as the apple-in-batter puddings that appear in eighteenth-century manuscript books and, at the savoury end, Yorkshire pudding. Puddings named after public figures were common in Victorian books, and the name of this one has sometimes been linked to William Wilberforce or his family, though Cassell's offers no explanation and nothing documents the connection. What makes the entry unusual is that it argues its case, pausing to explain why the apples must go in unpared. The economy is characteristic too: no peeling, no coring and no pastry.