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Apple Pudding (Fill a buttered dish)
Fill a buttered dish with sliced apples, and pour over the top a batter made of one tablespoon of butter, one-half cup of sugar, one egg, one-half cup of milk and one cup of flour, in which has been sifted one teaspoon of baking powder. Bake in a moderate oven until brown.
Serve with cream and sugar or liquid sauce.
— Mrs. Ira B. Kerr
A plain batter pudding of the sort every community cookbook carried: apples on the bottom, a thin cake batter poured over, baked until the top browns. The proportions are sound; only the oven and dish need translating.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. Allow 40 to 50 minutes — the batter is wet enough that a lightly browned top can still hide raw centre, so test with a skewer through the batter layer, not just the apples.
- Dish sizeAn 8-inch square or a 9-inch pie plate is right. The batter comes to under two cups; in anything larger it spreads too thin and bakes into a crust rather than a pudding.
- How much appleNo quantity is given. Three or four medium tart apples, peeled and sliced thin, fill the dish to a depth of about an inch and a half without swamping the batter.
- Butter the dish, then the batterThe single tablespoon of butter belongs in the batter and should be softened or melted and beaten with the sugar and egg; the dish is buttered separately, before the apples go in.
- The batter is stiffThe batter is thick -- One cup of flour to half a cup of milk gives a thick batter rather than a freely pouring one. Spread it over the apples with a spatula if it does not flow, or slacken it with a tablespoon or two more milk.
- Liquid saucePeriod shorthand for a thin pudding sauce — usually butter, sugar, boiling water and a little vanilla or nutmeg, sometimes thickened with a spoonful of flour. Hard sauce is the other traditional partner.
- YieldSix modest servings. Best warm; the apples weep as it cools and the underside of the batter softens.
This is the American descendant of the English batter pudding, in which fruit is buried under a pour of flour, egg and milk and baked — the same family as the French clafoutis, though that lineage is not documented as a direct source. What marks this one as turn-of-the-century American is the teaspoon of baking powder: the older versions relied on eggs and a hot oven for lift, while chemical leavening, cheap and reliable by the 1890s, let a cook get a light top from a single egg. Attributed contributions like Mrs. Kerr's were the whole substance of church and village cookbooks, each household putting in the dish it was known for, and the terseness here — no oven time, no quantity of apples — assumes a reader who already knew what a baked pudding should look like going into the oven.