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Pudding Without Milk or Eggs
Put into a buttered baking-dish, alternate layers of grated bread, and finely chopped apples seasoned with brown sugar, bits of butter and allspice. Pour over it a pint of wine and water mixed. Let the top layer be bread crumbs, and bake one hour.--Miss N.
A frugal apple charlotte in all but name, written in the loose style of a recipe passed between neighbors. Almost every quantity is left to the cook, so proportion is yours to set.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 350F for the stated hour, in a dish deep enough to hold the liquid without boiling over. If the top browns before the apples soften, cover loosely with foil for the last twenty minutes.
- Grated breadThis means dry, day-old bread rubbed on a box grater into coarse crumbs, not packaged fine crumbs, which turn to paste. Panko is closer in texture than commercial dried crumbs.
- Quantities to work fromThe recipe gives none, so these are only a starting point: about 4 cups coarse crumbs, 2 lb tart apples chopped small, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 4 tablespoons butter in bits, and 1 to 2 teaspoons allspice, built as three layers of apple between four of bread. With the pint of liquid this needs a deep 3-quart dish rather than a 2-quart one.
- The pint of wine and waterA pint is 2 cups. Half wine, half water is the usual reading; a madeira, sherry, or any decent white works. The liquid should come no more than two-thirds up the dish, or the crumbs will not set.
- The layer that mattersButter the crumb layers generously, including the top. Without milk or eggs there is nothing else to bind or enrich the pudding, and dry crumbs soaked in wine alone bake to a sodden mat.
- ApplesUse a firm, acidic variety such as Granny Smith, Braeburn, or Winesap. Chop rather than slice, as the recipe says, so the fruit collapses into the crumbs instead of sitting in strata.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight, warm, spooned from the dish. It is dry by modern standards and wants a pour of cream, a hard sauce, or a wine sauce alongside.
Recipes headed "without milk or eggs" appear throughout nineteenth-century Southern household books, and they are documents of scarcity as much as of thrift: in a region where dairy was seasonal, cows went dry, and hens stopped laying in cold weather, a cook still needed a pudding for the table. Marion Cabell Tyree's Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled from contributions by some 250 ladies in Virginia "and her sister states," and the initialed attributions like "Miss N." mark it as a genuine community collection rather than an author's invention. The dish itself belongs to the broad family of bread-and-fruit puddings, close kin to the apple charlotte and to "brown betty," generally documented as an American dish with the earliest known references in the 1860s United States, in which stale bread does the structural work that flour and eggs do elsewhere. The pint of wine is not extravagance but function, supplying the moisture and much of the flavor that milk and eggs would otherwise have carried.