Home › Fruit Desserts › Macaroni and Apple Pudding
Macaroni and Apple Pudding
1 pound of apples 4 ounces pipe macaroni 2 ounces sugar 2 ounces white bread crumbs 1 tablespoon cream Rind of 1/2 lemon grated 1 ounce butter Cook the macaroni in boiling water for three-quarters of an hour or until it is tender but not broken; drain it well. Butter a pie dish or a pudding basin, and line with the macaroni. Now sprinkle it with bread crumbs. Pare and cut up the apples very fine; mix with the grated lemon peel, cream and sugar. Fill the basin with this mixture, and sprinkle a few bread crumbs on top. Cut up the butter, and put small pieces on the bread crumbs. Now add a layer of macaroni; trim it round, cover with a plate, and bake one hour. Turn out and serve with a white sauce.
A lined mould of macaroni filled with raw grated apple, baked until both set into a turn-out pudding. Two things in the original need translating: the pasta and the missing oven temperature.
- Pipe macaroniThis means long, straight hollow tubes, not the short elbows sold as macaroni today. The length is the point, since the pieces are laid round the basin to make a lining that will hold together when turned out. Bucatini or long ziti works; elbows will not knit into a wall.
- The cooking time is for a different pastaThree-quarters of an hour reflects the thicker, harder macaroni of the period. Modern dried pasta reaches "tender but not broken" in 8 to 12 minutes. Cook it a minute or two past al dente, since it gets a further hour in the oven, then drain and cool slightly so it is handleable.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For a pudding of this kind a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent for the stated hour. The covering plate will keep the top macaroni from drying and browning, and can be lifted for the last ten minutes if you want a little colour.
- Weights and measuresOne pound of apples is about three medium apples, roughly 450g, before paring. Four ounces of macaroni is about 115g dry; two ounces sugar is a generous quarter cup; one ounce butter is two tablespoons. The single tablespoon of cream is all the liquid the filling gets, so use a firm cooking apple rather than a watery one and expect the fruit's own juice to do the rest.
- "Cut up very fine"The apples go in raw and have only an hour to cook through, insulated by macaroni. Slice or dice them small, 1/4 inch at most, or coarsely grate them. Large chunks will still be crisp at the centre when the pudding is set.
- Turning outButter the basin heavily and consider a disc of parchment in the base. Let the pudding stand five to ten minutes out of the oven before inverting, so the starch firms and the macaroni lining holds its shape.
- The white sauceFor a sweet pudding this is most likely a sweet pouring sauce rather than a savoury bechamel: milk thickened with a little cornstarch or flour, sweetened, and flavoured with vanilla or lemon. A thin custard serves the same purpose.
- YieldServes four as a dessert, or six in small portions. It is a substantial pudding despite the fruit.
Sweet macaroni puddings were a fixture of nineteenth-century British and American cookery: macaroni was simply another starch to be baked with milk, sugar and lemon peel, in the same family as rice and sago puddings. The lining-and-turning-out technique here recalls the moulded charlotte, where bread or sponge forms a shell around a fruit filling, though the connection is suggestive rather than documented. Its appearance in a meatless cookbook is in keeping with the moment such books flourished in the English-speaking world, when meatless days were promoted as a way of conserving supplies and cooks needed filling dishes built on grain, dairy and fruit. A pudding that turns a pound of apples and four ounces of pasta into dinner's final course answers that brief exactly.