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Apple Custard
Into a pudding pan put 1 1/2 quarts of pared, quartered, and cored apples. Sprinkle over them three-fourths cup sugar and one-fourth teaspoon salt. Bake till tender. While the apples are baking, prepare a custard from the following ingredients: 3/4 quart milk 1/2 cup sugar 2 whole eggs and two yolks 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/4 teaspoon salt Warm the milk. Beat the eggs and yolks together, then beat the sugar into them. Stir into them the hot milk, vanilla, and salt, and beat well together. This should be ready when the apples are done. Pour this custard over the hot apples, and return to the oven to bake just long enough for the custard to set. A meringue may then be put over the pudding, if desired, by beating the two egg whites and folding into them three level tablespoons sugar, spreading this on the pudding, and setting it on the grate of the oven long enough to color the meringue a light brown.
Cup Custard (Burnt Orange Flavor) Follow the recipe for Maple Cup Custard, using one-fourth cup sugar in place of the maple sirup, omit the maple flavoring, and use a few drops of caramel to color and flavor, and use the grated rind of half an orange instead of the vanilla. Grate the orange rind very thin, so as to remove only the colored outside part.
A two-stage baked pudding: apples roasted soft, then flooded with a hot custard that finishes in the same dish. The whole thing hinges on stopping the custard before it curdles.
- Quantities in modern terms1 1/2 quarts of pared, quartered apples is roughly 2 lb of fruit as bought, about four or five medium apples. The 3/4 quart of milk is 3 cups.
- The pudding panUse a 2- to 2 1/2-quart baking dish, deep enough that the custard covers the apples without reaching the rim. Ceramic or glass holds heat more gently than metal here.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe specifies none, only 'Bake till tender.' In a modern oven, 350-375F until a knife slides in easily, 30 to 40 minutes depending on variety, works; drop the oven to around 325F before the custard goes in.
- Setting the custardThis is the point of failure. Pull the dish when the edges are firm and the center still trembles slightly, around 170-175F on an instant-read thermometer; residual heat finishes it. Held longer, the eggs tighten and weep.
- Pouring hot on hotThe instruction to have the custard ready when the apples are done is deliberate. Hot milk into beaten eggs, then straight over hot fruit, means the mixture is already partway to setting and needs only a short spell in the oven.
- Apple choiceA firm cooking apple such as Braeburn, Granny Smith or Northern Spy keeps its quarters. Softer eating apples collapse to sauce under the custard, which is not a disaster but is a different dessert.
- The meringueThree tablespoons of sugar to two whites gives a soft, low-sugar meringue that browns fast and can bead or slump. The recipe simply says to set it on the oven grate until light brown; a hot oven (about 400F) or a broiler for a minute or two, watched closely, does the job.
- YieldServes six to eight. Best warm or at room temperature the day it is made; the meringue does not survive refrigeration well.
Baked apple custards belong to a long line of English and American "apple puddings" in which fruit and a set egg custard share one dish, with no separate pastry case. The pairing is thrifty rather than fancy: sweetened apples supply bulk and acidity, and a modest number of eggs stretched with milk supplies the richness. The level measures and the neighbouring maple and "burnt orange" cup custards suggest an early twentieth-century American cookery book, though the tradition it comes out of cannot be identified from this page alone. Using two whole eggs plus two extra yolks and then spending the leftover whites on a meringue is at least an economical arrangement, whatever the author's intent.