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Apple Batter Pudding
Peel, core, and slice thin six tart apples and place in baking-dish. Cream together one-fourth cup butter and one cup sugar; add two eggs, one cup of milk, and two cups of flour in which must be sifted two teaspoons baking powder. Pour the mixture over the apples and steam one hour. Serve with cream or sauce.
APPLE SLUMP No. I Pare, core, and quarter one dozen tart, juicy apples and place in a saucepan which has a close cover. Pour over them a pint of hot water and set on the back of the stove for eight minutes, when add two cups of molasses. Make a soft biscuit dough with milk and roll out half an inch thick, making of it a cover for the apples. Place this paste-cover on the apples and put on tight the lid of the saucepan, bucket, or other vessel used. Cook on top of stove for thirty minutes without lifting cover. This may be set in oven to brown a few minutes or served as it iswith a sweet sauce. APPLE SLUMP No. 2 Mix with a milk biscuit dough (using a pint and a half of flour) one or two eggs and through it two quarts of finecut apples. Place half an inch thick in buttered bakingpan. Bake in quick oven and eat with cream.
Three related apple puddings run together on one page: a steamed batter pudding and two versions of slump, the New England dumpling-over-fruit dish. All are workable, though the sugar and molasses quantities are generous by current taste.
- Steaming, not bakingThe batter pudding is steamed, so the dish needs to be buttered, covered tightly with foil or a lid, and set on a rack in a large pot with water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops; an hour is right for a dish about 8 inches across.
- Batter consistencyThe recipe says to pour the mixture over the apples; creamed butter and sugar with two eggs, one cup milk and two cups flour gives a thick batter that may need coaxing level with a spatula. It will spread further as it steams.
- Tart applesGranny Smith, Bramley or any firm cooking apple. Six apples is roughly 2 lb; the two quarts of "fine-cut" apples in Slump No. 2 is about 2 to 2 1/2 lb prepared, or five to six good-sized apples.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood range this meant a cooler spot for gentle cooking. Use low heat and give the apples their eight minutes at a slow simmer before the molasses goes in.
- MolassesTwo cups of molasses for a dozen apples is very dark and very sweet by modern palates. Half that, or a mix of molasses and light brown sugar, gives a milder result. Use unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which turns bitter.
- Soft biscuit doughA standard baking-powder biscuit dough, wet enough to roll but not stiff. Cut a slit or two in the cover so steam escapes into the pot rather than lifting the lid, and do not peek: the dumpling top sets by trapped steam, and the thirty minutes uninterrupted is the whole trick.
- Quick ovenFor Slump No. 2, roughly 400 to 425F. A pint and a half of flour is about 3 cups; the batter is a stiff, apple-loaded dough, and spread only half an inch thick as directed it will bake in perhaps 20 to 30 minutes, until the top is browned and a skewer comes out clean of dough.
- Yield and servingThe batter pudding and Slump No. 2 each serve six to eight; Slump No. 1, with a dozen apples, is the largest of the three. "Cream" here means plain heavy cream poured over, unwhipped; a hard sauce or a thin vanilla sauce also suits the steamed pudding.
Slump is a New England name for fruit stewed beneath a biscuit crust, cousin to grunt, cobbler and pandowdy, and the names shift from one county to the next; the story that a slump "slumps" onto the plate while a grunt is the noise the fruit makes as it cooks is traditional rather than documented. The dish is old enough that Louisa May Alcott is often said to have named the family house at Concord Apple Slump after it. Its logic is a stovetop one: before reliable oven heat, a covered kettle over the fire could steam a dumpling as well as any range, which is why both slump recipes here insist on a close-fitting lid and only optionally move the pot to the oven for colour. The batter pudding that opens the page belongs to the same family of steamed puddings, kept alive in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century as a way of turning a few pounds of windfall apples into a hot dessert with flour, milk and eggs already in the house.