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Apple and Grapenut Caramel Pudding
6 apples 1 C brown sugar 1/2 C butter 1 T flour 1 C grapenuts Peel and slice apples, place in baking dish. Cream together brown sugar and butter. Add flour and grapenuts and spread the mixture over the apples.
Bake slowly and serve when slightly warm with whipped cream.
Mrs. H. A. Taylor.
A crumb-topped baked apple dish of the streusel family, using Grape-Nuts in place of oats or breadcrumbs. The instructions are terse even by church-cookbook standards, so a few numbers help.
- AbbreviationsC is a cup, T a tablespoon. So: 1 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 cup Grape-Nuts.
- "Bake slowly"Read this as 300-325F. At that temperature a 9-inch dish of sliced apples needs roughly 45 to 60 minutes, until the fruit is tender to a knife tip and the topping has darkened and set. The low heat is what caramelizes the brown sugar and butter rather than scorching the cereal.
- Grape-NutsStill sold, and still a hard nugget-shaped baked cereal rather than a flake, though the formula has not stayed wholly unchanged. It absorbs the melting butter and sugar and turns crisp-chewy, which is the point of the dish. Another dry, barely sweetened wheat cereal or coarse dry breadcrumbs will behave similarly.
- The topping is a paste, not a crumbleCreamed butter and brown sugar with only a tablespoon of flour gives a thick spreadable mixture. Dot and spread it over the apples in an even layer; it will loosen and flow as it heats, so full coverage matters more than tidiness.
- ApplesSix apples is about 2 to 2 1/2 lb, enough to fill an 8x8-inch or 9-inch dish. Use a variety that holds its shape, such as Braeburn, Granny Smith or Golden Delicious. Very soft apples collapse into sauce under a topping this heavy.
- No liquid, no spiceThe original adds neither, and none is needed: the apples release their own juice. A pinch of salt in the topping and a little cinnamon on the fruit are period-appropriate if you want them.
- ServingServes 6 to 8. "Slightly warm" looks deliberate: the buttery caramel is very loose and rich straight from the oven and firms up as the dish cools for a while.
- The stray lineThe "6 eggs 6 T sugar" at the end is almost certainly the opening of an adjoining recipe that has bled onto the page, and has nothing to do with this pudding. Ignore it.
Grape-Nuts, made in Battle Creek from the late 1890s, was one of the earliest packaged breakfast cereals, and its manufacturer promoted it as a general cooking ingredient rather than only a breakfast food, in recipe pamphlets and newspaper advertising through the first decades of the twentieth century. Grape-Nuts puddings, custards, breads and toppings do turn up in community cookbooks of the 1910s-1930s, plausibly because the dense baked nuggets held their crunch better than breadcrumbs. A church cookbook of that era is a likely home for such a recipe, contributed under a member's married name and assuming a cook who already knew what a slow oven felt like and how long her own apples took.