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Apples in Ambush
2 cups Five Roses flour. ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 eggs ¾ cup milk 1 teaspoon vanilla 5 large tart apples.
Mix baking powder with the flour.
Melt butter and sugar together, and add.
Whip the eggs, and then put in milk and vanilla. Beat well as for a cake, but do not have too stiff. Add a little more milk if required.
Other Peel and cut up the apples, and mix with the batter. Butter a deep pudding dish and bake in a quick oven. fruit can be used instead of apples. Serve with any sweet sauce. 1 egg
A plain apple batter pudding from a Canadian flour-mill cookbook, closer to a thick cake batter loaded with fruit than to a steamed pudding. The proportions work as written; the main decisions left to the cook are oven heat and dish size.
- Oven heatA "quick oven" is usually reckoned somewhere around 400-425F. For a deep dish this full of raw apple, start hot and then drop to about 375F so the centre sets before the top colours too far; expect roughly 45-55 minutes.
- Dish and depthA "deep pudding dish" here means a generous 2- to 3-quart baking dish, at least 2 inches deep. Five large apples make a great deal of bulk for two cups of flour, so do not use anything shallow.
- Melted butter and sugarMelting the butter with the sugar rather than creaming them tends to give a denser, more pudding-like crumb. Let the mixture cool to barely warm before it meets the eggs.
- Batter consistency"Beat well as for a cake, but do not have too stiff" is the hinge. Aim for a batter that drops heavily from the spoon; too stiff a batter will not settle around the fruit.
- The applesTart cooking apples with structure are what is wanted -- Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy. Cut them into thick slices or large dice rather than fine pieces, or they collapse into sauce and wet the crumb.
- Egg countThe ingredient list calls for two eggs and the method says to whip "the eggs"; the stray "1 egg" trailing the text is a printing or scanning artifact. Use two.
- Sweet sauceA hard sauce, a thin custard, or a simple boiled sauce of butter, sugar, water and a little lemon all suit. Serve warm, not hot from the oven, so the fruit stops steaming the crumb.
- YieldSix to eight servings from a 2-quart dish. Leftovers reheat well, covered, at 325F.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and distributed in very large numbers to Canadian households in the early twentieth century; like other millers' books it exists to keep a particular brand of flour in the pantry, and the flour is named in the ingredient lists throughout. Names such as "Apples in Ambush" are often said to belong to a long tradition of whimsical pudding titles -- the fruit lies hidden in the batter until the spoon finds it, a playfulness informally associated with older English dishes such as Apple Hedgehog. The recipe is also of a kind that may have grown commoner as chemical leavening spread: a pudding baked in a quick oven rather than boiled or steamed, a batter cake in all but name.