Home › Pudding Recipes › Apple Pudding
Apple Pudding
1/2 pint (I cup) water I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) cornstarch A few drops red coloring 4 ozs. (4 heaping tablespoonfuls) sugar Marmalade Mince meat Peel and core the apples; put into each apple two cloves and as much mince meat as it will hold.
Place the apples, without touching each other, in a buttered fireproof dish; add the remaining sugar, the grated rind and strained juice of the lemon, and the water.
Bake in the oven, covering the casserole with its lid. Look at them frequently, and as soon as they are tender place them in dainty ramequins.
Stir into the liquor in the casserole the cornstarch dissolved in a little cold water; boil for ten minutes, stirring all the time; add the red coloring and strain it over the apples.
When quite cold garnish the tops of the apples with the marmalade.
A baked stuffed apple dressed up with a clear red glaze. The printed ingredient list has been mangled in setting — the apples, lemon, cloves and part of the sugar are named only in the method — so read the instructions first and build your own list from them.
- What you actually needFirm baking apples (the recipe does not say how many; the quantities suit roughly half a dozen), whole cloves (two per apple), one lemon, the printed 4 ozs. sugar (about 1/2 cup), 1 cup water, cornstarch, red coloring, mincemeat for the filling and marmalade for the tops. "The remaining sugar" suggests some was meant to be worked into the filling; a spoonful stirred into the mincemeat covers it.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A covered dish of apples in liquid wants a moderate oven, 350F, for roughly 35-50 minutes depending on the variety and size. The instruction to look at them frequently is the real guide — they should yield to a skewer but still hold their shape for the ramekins.
- The casseroleHere the casserole is the lidded fireproof baking dish itself, and the same dish goes on the stovetop afterward to thicken the syrup. If yours is earthenware and not flameproof, strain the liquor into a saucepan instead.
- The cornstarch measure is contradictoryOne ounce of cornstarch by weight is closer to 1/4 cup than to a single heaping tablespoon. For a pourable glaze over a cup of liquid, one tablespoon is right; the ounce would set it to a sliceable jelly. Go by the tablespoon unless you want the stiffer finish.
- Do not boil it ten minutesCornstarch reaches full thickness within a minute or two of coming to a boil, and prolonged boiling breaks it back down to a thin, dull syrup. Bring it to a boil, stir for a minute, then strain over the apples while hot so it coats evenly.
- MincemeatPeriod mincemeat contained beef suet and often minced meat proper; jarred supermarket mincemeat today is fruit, spice and vegetable suet and works without adjustment. Core the apples from the top without cutting through the base so the filling stays put.
- Red coloringThe recipe says only "red coloring"; cochineal was the common red of the period and is the likely intention. Any modern liquid food color does the same job, and a spoonful of redcurrant jelly melted into the syrup gives the color plus some flavor.
- RamequinsSmall individual dishes, one apple to each. Serve cold as directed — the glaze needs to set before the marmalade goes on top.
Fireproof ware — glazed earthenware and, later, borosilicate dishes that could go from oven to table — was fashionable in the earlier twentieth century, though this page alone will not date the recipe. Whole baked apples stuffed with dried fruit are far older, a standard English nursery and supper dish, but the treatment here is restaurant styling applied to a plain thing: individual ramekins, a mirror-clear scarlet glaze, a spoonful of marmalade on each crown. The red was most likely cochineal, a widely used red food dye of the period; the cornstarch glaze does the same work as an aspic or a fruit jelly at a fraction of the trouble. Mincemeat was used for more than pies, stuffed fruit among them.