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Apple Pudding
Pare and slice a few nice cooking apples, and put into a pan to the depth of 2 or 3 inches. Add sugar to taste and any desired flavoring.
Make a batter of 1 cup sweet milk, a small teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 1 teaspoon soda and 2 teaspoons cream of tartar sifted with sufficient Five Roses flour to make a batter as stiff as for pound cake. Serve with cream.
Note on Apple Puddings-After paring fruit, drop it in cold water to prevent it changing color through contact with the air.
A good sauce for apple pudding is made by simply boiling good molasses with a little butter and serving hot.
A plain fruit batter pudding of the kind that filled out a winter table. The original assumes you know how such puddings are cooked, so the most important information — how long and at what heat — is missing entirely.
- No cooking instruction is givenThe text stops at "serve with cream," and neither method, heat nor time is stated. A batter pudding of this kind was cooked either way: steamed in a greased basin, covered with cloth or paper, over water for about two hours, or baked in a buttered dish. If baking, a moderate oven (around 350F) for 45 to 55 minutes, until the batter is set and a skewer comes out clean, is a reasonable modern reading and gives the lighter result.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is home-mixed baking powder in the standard proportion. Substitute about 4 teaspoons of commercial baking powder and omit both, sifting it with the flour.
- Sweet milkMeans fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk called for elsewhere in books of this period. Ordinary whole milk.
- "As stiff as for pound cake"A thick batter that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pouring. With 1 cup milk and 1 egg that lands around 1 3/4 to 2 cups of flour, but add it gradually — flour absorbency varies and the instruction is a texture cue, not a measurement.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring-wheat flour, closer to modern bread flour in protein than to soft Southern flour. Plain all-purpose works well here; the pudding is not delicate.
- Depth of applesTwo or three inches of sliced apples is a great deal of fruit; in a dish of around 2 quarts that would be something like 6 to 8 medium apples, though the original specifies no dish size. The batter goes over the top, and keeping it to about an inch will help the centre cook through.
- Keeping the apples palePlain cold water slows browning; water with a squeeze of lemon in it slows it a good deal more. Drain well before layering, or the batter sits on wet fruit.
- The molasses sauceBoil molasses with a knob of butter only until it thickens slightly, a minute or two. Held longer it darkens and turns bitter.
- YieldProbably six to eight servings, though the original fixes neither the dish nor the amount of fruit.
Batter puddings baked or steamed over fruit run through British and North American cookery for centuries, and the apple version is among the most familiar of them — cheap, filling, and made from what was in the cellar in March. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional book for its flour, compiled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which explains the telegraphic style here: contributors wrote down what varied between households and left out what everyone already knew, including how long to steam a pudding. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening rather than a packaged baking powder is a period marker too; both were kitchen staples bought separately, and mixing your own was cheaper.