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College Pudding
½ cup strained apple sauce rind and juice of one lemon 1/4 teaspoon salt Mix ingredients in order given. Line a pudding dish with plain paste, fill with apple mixture, and bake fortyfive minutes in a moderate oven. Serve with butter and sugar. 2 cups quartered apples cup molasses ½ cup brown sugar 4 cups milk
The text as printed is scrambled — the ingredient list has been broken apart and set both above and below the method, and two quantities have lost their numbers. Read it as a pastry-lined apple pudding and treat the amounts with caution.
- The garbled ingredient listReassembled, the recipe appears to call for 2 cups quartered apples, ½ cup strained apple sauce, an unspecified quantity of molasses, ½ cup brown sugar, the rind and juice of one lemon, and ¼ teaspoon salt. The "4 cups milk" may well have strayed in from a neighbouring recipe, since four cups of milk in a pastry-lined dish baked 45 minutes would not set.
- Molasses is unquantifiedThe line reads only "cup molasses" — the fraction has dropped out in printing. The original figure is genuinely lost.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350–375F. Forty-five minutes suits a single-crust pudding of this depth; the apples should be tender and the filling bubbling at the edge.
- Plain pasteAn unsweetened short pastry, somewhere between three and two parts flour to one part fat. It lines the dish only — there is no top crust, so blind-baking is unnecessary but a hot baking sheet under the dish helps the base.
- Strained apple sauceUnsweetened apple sauce pushed through a sieve, which acts as the binder for the quartered fresh apples. Modern jarred apple sauce works; use the unsweetened kind or reduce the brown sugar.
- Mix in order givenMeaningless as the list now stands. Combine the apples with the sauce, sugar, molasses, lemon and salt, and let them sit ten minutes so the sugar draws out some juice before filling the shell.
- Serve with butter and sugarProbably butter creamed with sugar in the manner of a hard sauce, spooned on the hot pudding so it melts. Cream or a thin custard is a reasonable substitute.
- YieldEnough for a pie plate or shallow 8-inch dish; about four to six modest servings.
"College pudding" is a name generally traced to the English university colleges, where a small steamed or baked pudding of suet, dried fruit and spice was a familiar dish; by the nineteenth century the term had loosened to mean almost any plain, cheap, filling pudding, and American books applied it freely to apple and molasses versions like this one. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its chocolate specialities it carried a full range of ordinary household recipes so the volume could serve as a working kitchen manual. The apple-and-molasses filling belongs to a long New England habit of sweetening with molasses rather than sugar alone.