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Apple Batter Pudding
2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups quartered apples 2 tablespoons lemon juice 4 cup sugar Mix sugar, salt, flour, eggs and milk. When smooth, add apples; pour into buttered baking dish, and bake slowly in a moderate oven one hour. Serve immediately with wine sauce.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — flour, eggs and milk appear in the method but never in the list, and "4 cup sugar" is plainly a typesetting casualty. Treat this as a batter pudding of the popover/clafoutis family and fill the gaps from the type rather than from this page.
- The missing quantitiesNothing on the page tells us the amounts of flour, eggs and milk; a workable reconstruction for a batter pudding of this type would be about 1 cup flour, 3 eggs and 1 1/2 to 2 cups milk. The printed "4 cup sugar" is a corruption, most likely 1/4 cup (1/2 cup is also possible); four cups of sugar could not be intended.
- Moderate oven350F. The instruction to "bake slowly in a moderate oven" is not a contradiction — it means do not push the heat to set the top before the custard beneath has cooked through.
- An hour is rightUnlike a popover, this batter is weighed down with fruit and needs the full hour. It is done when a knife inserted at the centre comes out clean and the pudding no longer wobbles as a mass.
- The applesTwo cups of quartered apples is roughly two medium apples; the recipe does not specify variety or say whether to peel them. Quarters are large; halve them again if you want the fruit to cook through in the same hour as the batter.
- Butter and lemonThe method accounts for neither ingredient: butter appears only in "buttered baking dish," and the lemon juice is never used at all in the printed directions. The straightforward reading is that the butter greases the dish and the lemon juice goes with the apples.
- Wine sauceOne common period wine sauce is butter and sugar creamed, thinned with sherry or Madeira and warmed without boiling; others are sugar-and-water sauces thickened with flour or cornstarch and flavoured with wine. A hard sauce or plain cream will do the same job.
- Serve immediatelyMeant literally: a batter pudding is best straight from the oven, as it will sink and firm up as it cools, though a sugared batter heavy with fruit will not rise or fall as dramatically as a plain popover.
- YieldSix servings from a 1 1/2 to 2 quart baking dish.
Batter puddings — flour, eggs and milk baked or boiled until set — were among the plainest sweets in the English and American household repertoire, and fruit was commonly added to the batter. The Lowney company published its cook books from Boston to promote its chocolate, but the volumes were general-purpose collections, and the dessert chapters draw on the New England fruit larder, apples prominent among the fruits used. The ingredient list on this page is clearly garbled, though the page itself does not tell us how. Serving a homely baked pudding under a wine sauce was one of the period's ways of dressing up an everyday dish for the dinner table.