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Apple Sponge
1 cup flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 5 sliced apples ½ teaspoon salt Beat eggs; add sugar, flour in which baking powder has been sifted, and milk. Beat well; add apples; pour into buttered baking dish and bake in a moderate oven one hour. Serve with Italian sauce.
A plain batter pudding with sliced apples folded through it — halfway between a cobbler and a clafoutis. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so read the whole method before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for eggs, sugar and milk, but the printed list gives none of them. Comparable batter puddings of the period use 2 eggs, about ½ cup sugar and ½ to ¾ cup milk to 1 cup flour; treat that as a reconstruction, not the book's intention. Aim for a thick pancake batter that just coats the apples.
- Moderate ovenAround 350°F; period sources put a moderate oven anywhere from about 350 to 375°F. A full hour at that heat suits a deep dish of raw apple in batter — the fruit has to soften and shed liquid while the batter sets around it.
- Baking powder in 1907Baking powder -- two teaspoons to a cup of flour is generous by modern measure, though it was a common proportion in period recipes; 1½ is plenty today, and get the dish into the oven promptly once the batter is mixed.
- The applesFive apples is a lot of fruit for one cup of flour, which is the point — this is fruit bound by batter, not cake with apple in it. Use a firm tart variety that holds its shape, and slice thin so the pieces cook through in the hour.
- Dish and depthA buttered 8-inch square or 2-quart baking dish. Anything shallower and the batter dries before the apples give up their juice.
- DonenessThe centre should be set and springy rather than wet, and a skewer through the batter (not the fruit) should come out clean. Expect the surface to crack and the fruit to sink.
- Italian saucePresumably a recipe given elsewhere in the same book rather than anything bought. Any warm wine, custard or hard sauce serves the same purpose; the pudding is dry enough to want one.
- YieldSix modest servings. Best warm, within an hour or two of baking — it goes heavy once fully cold.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 under the name of the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard; like the Baker's and Rumford books of the same decade it was a promotional volume that happened to be a competent general cookbook. "Sponge" here seems to be used loosely, as it often is said to have been in American home cookery of the period, to mean any light egg-raised batter rather than the fatless whisked sponge of professional baking. Puddings of this kind — a cup of flour, a spoonful or two of chemical leavening, and whatever fruit was to hand — were the workhorse dessert of the late-nineteenth-century American kitchen, cheap enough for a weeknight and flexible enough to absorb whatever the season offered.