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Steamed Apple Pudding
2 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter 3/4 cup milk 4 apples cut in eighths Mix and sift dry ingredients; work in butter with tips of fingers, add milk gradually, mixing with a knife; toss on floured board, pat and roll out, place apples on middle of dough, and sprinkle with one tablespoon sugar mixed with one-fourth teaspoon each of salt and nutmeg; bring dough around apples and carefully lift into buttered mould or five-pound lard pail; or apples may be sprinkled over dough, and dough rolled like a jelly roll; cover closely, and steam one hour and twenty minutes; serve with Vanilla or Cold Sauce. Twice the number of apples may be sprinkled with sugar and cooked until soft in granite kettle placed on top of range, covered with dough, rolled size to fit in kettle, then kettle covered tightly, and dough steamed fifteen minutes. When turned on dish for serving, apples will be on top.
A baking-powder suet-less dough steamed around apples, in the New England manner. The dough is essentially a rich biscuit, and the method is closer to a dumpling than a cake.
- Do not overwork the doughThe hinge is a light hand: cut the butter in until it looks like coarse meal, add the milk with a knife, and stop as soon as it holds. Kneading or re-rolling gives a tough, dense pudding that steam cannot rescue.
- The mouldA "five-pound lard pail" is a cylindrical tin of roughly 2 1/2 to 3 quarts. Any pudding basin, tall tin or metal bowl of that order works; butter it well, fill no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with buttered foil or a cloth tied under the rim so condensation does not soak the dough.
- How to steam itSet the covered mould on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full 1 hour 20 minutes. Top up with boiling water as needed; letting the pot run dry is the usual failure.
- ApplesFour apples cut in eighths means firm cooking apples of ordinary size, about 1 1/2 lb. Granny Smith or Northern Spy hold their shape and have the acidity this sweet dough wants; soft modern dessert apples collapse to sauce.
- SugarOne tablespoon of sugar for four apples is very restrained by current taste; the recipe's accompanying Vanilla or Cold Sauce presumably made up much of the sweetness. Two to three tablespoons will suit most modern palates better.
- The second methodA "granite kettle" is an enamelled steel pot. Cooking the apples soft first and steaming a dough lid over them for fifteen minutes is the faster version, and it produces what would now be called an apple cobbler or upside-down dumpling.
- SaucesVanilla sauce here is a sweetened cornstarch or egg-thickened pouring sauce; cold sauce is creamed butter and sugar flavoured with vanilla, served firm against the hot pudding. Either is worth making, as the pudding is plain on its own.
- YieldProbably about six servings. It should be turned out and served hot; steamed biscuit dough goes heavy and pasty as it cools.