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Apple Jack
1 egg. 1 cup buttermilk 1 teaspoon soda Pinch of salt 1 tablespoon lard Five Roses flour to thicken Apples.
Cover bottom of pudding dish with apples. Sprinkle with sugar, then put in a layer of batter. Then another layer of apples, sugar and batter. Finish with apples sprinkled with sugar and little bits of butter.
A thrifty buttermilk batter layered with sliced apples, written for cooks who knew by feel what "flour to thicken" meant. The two things the original leaves out entirely are the flour quantity and the baking, so both need judgment.
- "Flour to thicken" is genuinely openThe original gives no measurement. For a batter that will spread in layers but not run off the apples, somewhere around 1 to 1 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour per cup of buttermilk gives a thick pouring consistency, but this is an estimate, not a conversion. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian flour; modern all-purpose is the nearest equivalent.
- Soda and buttermilkA teaspoon of soda to one cup of buttermilk is on the generous side by current practice and can leave a soapy or metallic edge. Three-quarters of a teaspoon is closer to the acid actually available. Mix and get it into the dish promptly; the lift begins as soon as the two meet.
- LardOne tablespoon, melted and stirred into the batter. Shortening or melted butter substitutes directly; butter browns the crumb a little more.
- Oven, since none is givenBake at 350F for 45 to 55 minutes, until the top layer of apples is tender and a skewer through the batter comes out clean. The dish is dense and wet at the start, so it needs the time more than the heat.
- Despite the section headingBaked, not boiled -- This reads as a baked pudding: a pudding dish, butter dotted on top, nothing about a cloth or a mould. Treat it as a baked apple pudding. If you want to steam it, it wants a covered, greased basin and around two hours, and the buttered apple topping loses its point.
- The applesFirm tart cooking apples, peeled and sliced thin, roughly 4 to 5 medium for an 8-inch square dish. Thick slices will still be crisp when the batter is done. How much sugar is left to you; 2 to 3 tablespoons total across the layers suits a sharp apple.
- Yield and servingFills an 8-inch square or 2-quart dish and serves six. Best warm, with cream or a sweet pudding sauce.
Apple pudding of this kind belongs to the long tradition of batter-and-fruit puddings that stretched a little flour and a jug of sour milk into a hot dessert — the same economy that produced cobblers, grunts and slumps in North American kitchens. Buttermilk here is doing two jobs: it is the liquid left over from butter-making, and its acid is what makes the soda work, in an era when baking powder was available but sour milk was free. The name "Apple Jack" in a pudding chapter has nothing to do with applejack the distilled cider spirit; beyond that, why the dish carries the name is not documented. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which is why so many entries, like this one, assume the reader already knows how much flour a batter wants.