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Apple Jonathan
Work butter into bread dough till it is quite short then with it line the sides of a baking-dish. Heap the centre with pared, cored, sliced apples and place a thick sheet of the paste on top. Bake well, then lift off the crust and turn it upside down on a second dish. Into the apples stir sugar and butter, with spice if desired, and spread upon the crust.
Eat hot with cream.
A bread-dough version of a deep-dish apple pudding, written for a cook who already had dough rising on the back of the stove. The quantities are left entirely to judgment, so the notes below fill in working amounts.
- The hinge: sugar goes in after bakingThe apples bake plain, then are sweetened and buttered off the heat, and the crust is lifted off and inverted before the fruit is spread on it.
- "Quite short"Short means high in fat to the point of tenderness. Work roughly 4 oz of soft butter into 1 lb of risen bread dough, kneading until it stops looking greasy. It will slacken considerably and needs a floured surface.
- QuantitiesA 2-quart baking dish takes about 2 lb of apples, pared and sliced, heaped high since they collapse. Reserve about a third of the dough for the top sheet, rolled a good half-inch thick so it holds together when turned out.
- Oven"Bake well" gives no temperature. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 375-400F, for 45 minutes to an hour suits it. The top sheet should be firm and browned all through, not merely coloured; too cool an oven leaves the underside doughy.
- ApplesUse a variety that breaks down: Bramley, McIntosh, Cortland. Firm modern eating apples stay in slices and will not stir into the soft mass the recipe expects.
- FinishingOff the heat, stir 3-4 oz of sugar and 1-2 oz of butter into the hot apples, with cinnamon, nutmeg or cloves if using, then spread over the inverted crust. Serve at once with cream.
- YieldSix servings from a 2-quart dish. It does not reheat well; the crust softens once the fruit sits on it.
Jonathans, pandowdies, grunts and slumps all belong to the same New England family of deep fruit puddings built on whatever dough or batter the kitchen had going, and the crust-and-fruit inversion here is close kin to the pandowdy, which is broken up and turned rather than lifted whole. The name is usually explained by way of "Brother Jonathan," the stock figure for a plain New Englander that predates Uncle Sam, though the connection is traditional rather than documented; the Jonathan apple, popularized in New York in the early nineteenth century, is a separate matter and no particular variety is called for. Using enriched bread dough instead of pastry marks the dish as thrifty and domestic: it assumes a household that baked its own bread weekly and could pinch off a pound for pudding.