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Birds' Nest Pudding
Take 8 apples, pare and core, leaving whole. Fill the cores with sugar and a little nutmeg. Place in a pudding dish.
Now make a custard of 5 eggs to 1 quart of milk and sweeten to taste. Pour this around the apples, and bake in oven ½ hour. (See Paddy Bundles for slight variation of this recipe.) 1 egg
A whole-apple custard from the era when "pudding" covered anything baked or boiled in a dish. The original is terse about heat and timing, and both need attention.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A baked custard wants 325-350F; above that the eggs curdle and weep. Set the dish in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides to keep the custard smooth.
- The half hour is for the custard, not the applesWhole pared apples may not soften in 30 minutes at custard heat, depending on variety and size. Either use small, soft-fleshed apples, or bake them alone until nearly tender before setting them in the dish and pouring the custard around.
- Custard ratioFive eggs to a quart of milk is a soft set, close to a classic baked custard. Whole milk is what the book assumes; skim will set thin and watery.
- "Sweeten to taste"About 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar per quart of milk suits most palates, plus a spoonful in each apple core as directed.
- The stray "1 egg"The trailing line does not belong to the method, which already calls for five eggs to the quart. Its origin is unclear; it may be a fragment carried over from an adjacent entry or introduced in transcription.
- Doneness and yieldThe custard is done when set at the edges and barely trembling at the centre; residual heat finishes it. Eight apples serve eight, warm or cold.
Birds' nest pudding was a fixture of nineteenth-century North American home cookery, the name traditionally traced to the whole apples sitting in custard like eggs in a nest; a related version baked under a batter or crust was often called crow's nest pudding. It belongs to a large family of thrifty apple-and-custard dishes that made a substantial sweet from staples any farm kitchen had in quantity: apples from the cellar, milk and eggs from the yard. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book, a flour-milling company's collection of recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, is typical of that book's character, and the recipe notes a cross-reference to "Paddy Bundles" as a slight variation.