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Apple Pudding (One-half dozen green apples)
One-half dozen green apples, peel and core and cut in eighths. Make batter of two eggs well beaten with one-half cup sugar, a cup of milk and piece of butter size of nutmeg. Stir in about two cups of flour, one heaping teaspoon of baking powder, and lastly the apples. Turn in a well buttered tin and bake in hot oven twenty or thirty minutes. Serve with sauce.
— Mrs. Herbert Dederick
A plain batter pudding of the sort that turned a bowl of hard early apples into dessert on short notice. The proportions are sound; the only vagueness is in the pan and the sauce.
- "Green apples"This means unripe, firm, tart summer apples rather than a green-skinned variety. Granny Smith, Braeburn or any firm tart apple works; six medium apples give roughly 2 lb whole, about 5 cups once peeled and cut in eighths.
- Butter the size of a nutmegA common nineteenth-century measure for a lump of about one tablespoon, or a scant ounce. Melt it and beat it into the eggs and milk rather than trying to cut it into the batter.
- "Hot oven"Read this as 400-425F. At that heat the batter sets and browns before the apples release much juice into it.
- The pan"A well buttered tin" is left unspecified; a shallow baking dish, a square cake tin or a 9-inch round will serve, though the full quantity of batter and apples will fill an 8-inch square. Keep the depth to about two inches or the centre may still be raw at thirty minutes.
- TimingTwenty to thirty minutes suits a shallow tin at high heat. Test with a skewer through the batter between apple slices, not through an apple, which will read wet regardless.
- Baking powderOne heaping teaspoon to two cups of flour is a little light by modern standards, where about two teaspoons would be usual. Commercial baking powders of the period varied in strength from brand to brand.
- The sauceLeft unspecified. A hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar with a little vanilla or nutmeg suits it, as does a thin lemon or vanilla pouring sauce. Cream is the simplest answer.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Best warm, within an hour or two of baking, as the batter tightens as it cools.
Batter puddings baked over fruit are one of the oldest and most adaptable forms in English and American home cooking, akin to clafoutis, cobbler and the various "apple slumps" and "birds' nest puddings" of nineteenth-century New England receipt books. The distinguishing feature here is the call for green apples: thinning fruit and windfalls arrived long before the keeping apples of October, and they were too sour and too firm to eat out of hand but excellent under sugar and heat. Contributed recipes like this one, signed with a neighbour's married name, are the substance of a village cookbook. The instructions assume the reader already knows what "sauce" means and how hot her own stove runs, which is why the pan size and the sauce go unnamed.