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Apple Custard Pudding
Stew six sour apples in half a cup of water. Rub through a sieve and sweeten. Make a custard of three pints milk, six eggs, four tablespoonfuls sugar. Put the apples in a pudding-dish, pour the custard over them, and bake slowly half an hour.--Mrs. M. B. B.
A plain baked custard poured over apple purée, of the kind that turned up on Virginia tables when apples were abundant and eggs cheap. The one thing to get right is the oven: a baked custard set too hot will curdle and weep no matter how good the apples are.
- "Bake slowly"The book gives no temperature. For a baked custard a modern equivalent is roughly 300-325°F; much above that and the eggs overcook at the edges before the centre sets, leaving a watery, grainy pudding.
- Timing is understatedThree pints of milk with six eggs is a large custard, and half an hour will not set it at 300°F. Expect 50 to 70 minutes. It is done when the centre still trembles slightly and an instant-read thermometer shows 170–175°F; carryover heat finishes the job.
- Use a water bathIn a modern oven, stand the pudding-dish in a roasting pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides; it keeps the edges from setting hard before the centre.
- Sour applesSix apples is roughly 2 lb. Granny Smith, Bramley, or any firm tart variety; they should cook down to a thick purée rather than a sauce, so drive off excess liquid if it looks loose.
- SweeteningThe apples are sweetened to taste, and the custard takes only four tablespoons of sugar for three pints of milk — restrained by modern standards. Two to three tablespoons of sugar in the apples is usually enough if you want the fruit to read as tart against the custard.
- Vessel sizePurée plus something over seven cups of custard needs a dish of about 2½ to 3 quarts. Crowd it into a 2-quart dish and it will overflow in the water bath.
- MilkWhole milk. Skimmed milk sets thin and tastes chalky here; a cup of the milk replaced with cream gives a richer set closer to what a nineteenth-century farm dairy would have supplied.
- Yield and servingServes eight generously. Best just warm or at room temperature; refrigerate if holding longer, and eat within two days.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of these initialled attributions — the book reads as a collective record of what particular households actually cooked. Baked egg custards over stewed fruit belong to a long English tradition that came to the Chesapeake with the colonists, and the pairing with apples reflects orchard economics as much as taste: Virginia grew apples in quantity, and a barrel of tart cooking varieties kept well through winter in a cellar. The instruction to rub the stewed fruit through a sieve rather than mash it is a mark of the period's ambition toward smoothness, achieved by hand labour before food mills or blenders existed. Recipes of this type — milk, eggs, sugar, fruit, no pastry — sat at the frugal end of the dessert repertoire, and are often described in period cookbooks as suitable for invalids and children.