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Normandy Pudding
6 ounces bread crumbs 6 ounces sugar 6 small sour cooking apples 1 saltspoon ground cloves 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 lemon Peel, slice and core the apples, or chop them up not too finely; put them with all the other dry ingredients in a basin, and stir well. When thoroughly mixed, add the lemon juice and the finely grated rind of a half of it; also, a little brandy or rum if liked. Pour the mixture into a well greased mold, and tie over a greased cloth or paper, and steam for about three hours. Serve with white wine sauce. The use of rum or brandy is optional. The pudding is much more tasty if one or the other is added. Serve both the sauce and the pudding very hot as the latter is not so delicious when cold.
A steamed pudding with no suet, no eggs and no flour — the apples and their juice are the only moisture, so the choice of fruit does most of the work.
- Use genuinely juicy, tart applesWith no egg, milk or fat in the bowl, the apples supply all the liquid that binds the crumbs. Bramley, Granny Smith or any sharp cooking apple that collapses into juice will work; a firm dessert apple leaves the pudding dry and crumbly.
- Weights, not cups6 ounces of breadcrumbs is roughly 3 cups of loose fresh crumbs, and 6 ounces of sugar is a scant cup. Fresh soft crumbs, not dried packaged ones, which will drink the juice and set hard. Weigh if you can — crumb volume varies enormously with how coarsely you grate.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The clove is meant to sit behind the cinnamon, so do not round it up.
- Basin and moldThe "basin" is simply a mixing bowl. For the mold, a 1 to 1.5 quart pudding basin or straight-sided heatproof bowl is right; grease it well and fill no more than three-quarters, then cover with pleated greased parchment and foil, tied under the rim.
- SteamingSet the covered mold on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full three hours. Top up with boiling water as it drops; if the pan runs dry the base scorches and the pudding tastes of burnt sugar.
- The spiritTwo tablespoons of brandy or dark rum is about right, and it earns its place — it also adds the small amount of extra liquid the mixture wants. Calvados is the obvious choice given the name.
- White wine sauceWhite wine sauces of the period are generally sugar and dry white wine thickened with egg or with cornstarch, sometimes with butter and a little lemon; versions vary. Have it ready before the pudding is turned out; both should go to the table hot, as the recipe insists.
- YieldServes about six. Turn it out onto a warm plate and let it stand a minute before slicing, or it will slump.
Steamed breadcrumb puddings like this one are the thrifty end of the English pudding tradition — stale bread, sugar, spice and fruit tied in a cloth over the pot — and the Normandy in the name is usually taken as a nod to the apples, that region's defining crop and the source of its cider and Calvados, which the optional brandy may be meant to echo. What makes this version notable is what has been left out: no suet, no eggs, no milk. Books published under titles like Meatless Cookery belong to a run of American and British cookbooks that drew on the vegetarian and economy-cookery current, in which older recipes were reworked to do without meat, fat and eggs. The result here is a pudding that depends entirely on the fruit for moisture and on three long hours of steam to bring the crumbs together — which may be why the book is so firm that it must be eaten hot, noting only that it is "not so delicious when cold."