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Apple Batter Pudding
One egg One cup of milk One and one-half teaspoons of Larkin Baking Powder One-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt One and one-half cups of flour Slice apples into a buttered baking-dish, sprinkle over them one teaspoon of Larkin Cinnamon or Larkin Nutmeg. Pour the batter over the apples and bake one-half hour in a moderate oven. Serve with hard sauce.
A plain batter pudding of the sort a household kept in rotation because it uses one egg and whatever apples are on hand. The recipe assumes you know two things it never says: how many apples, and that the batter carries no sugar.
- Moderate ovenSet 350F. Half an hour is right for a shallow dish; if you use a deep one, expect 40-45 minutes and test that the batter is set through to the apples rather than trusting the clock.
- Apples: quantity unstatedThe original gives none. A 9-inch pie plate or 8-inch square dish takes about 3 medium firm-tart apples, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb, sliced thin. Any more and the batter cannot cover them; the pudding should be batter with fruit in it, not a crumble.
- No sugar in the batterDeliberate — the sweetness comes from the hard sauce. If you want the pudding to stand alone, 1/3 cup of sugar in the batter and a tablespoon over the apples brings it to modern expectations.
- Larkin brandsLarkin Baking Powder, Salt, Cinnamon and Nutmeg were the Buffalo company's own mail-order goods. Use any double-acting baking powder measure for measure; 1 1/2 teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour is within the normal modern range, so no adjustment is needed.
- Mixing the batterBeat the egg into the milk, then whisk in the sifted dry ingredients. It should pour thickly, like a heavy pancake batter. Do not work it smooth past the point of combining or the pudding turns tough.
- Butter the dish properlyApple juices catch fast at the edges. Butter generously and expect to serve from the dish rather than turn the pudding out.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, about 1/2 cup butter to 1 1/2 cups sugar, flavored with vanilla, brandy or a little of the same nutmeg. It is served cold and firm so it melts over the hot pudding; make it ahead and chill it.
- YieldFour to six servings, best eaten hot from the oven. Reheated, the batter goes dense.
Good Things to Eat was one of the cookbooks the Larkin Company of Buffalo distributed to promote its mail-order groceries and spices — hence the brand name attached to the baking powder, salt and cinnamon in nearly every ingredient list. The dish itself is much older than the book: batter puddings, a beaten mixture of egg, milk and flour baked around fruit or under meat drippings, run straight back through nineteenth-century American cookery to English practice, and are close kin to the French clafoutis and to Yorkshire pudding, which uses the same three ingredients to a savory end. Hard sauce, the standard accompaniment, is generally traced to English brandy butter served with Christmas pudding; American books of this period offer it with almost every hot steamed or baked pudding, and its stiff, cold richness is doing the work that sugar does not do in the batter itself.