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Apple Pudding, Baked
INGREDIENTS for a large pudding.-3 lbs. of apples, 6 oz. of moist sugar, 3 oz. of butter, APPLE PUDDING. 3 eggs, 1 pint of bread-crumbs, a few cloves.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Pare, core, and cut the apples as for sauce, and boil them until reduced to a pulp with the cloves, which should then be taken out; then add the butter, melted, and the eggs, which should be well whisked. Beat up the pudding for 2 or 3 minutes; butter a pie-dish; put in a layer of bread-crumbs, then the apple, and then another layer of bread-crumbs; flake over these a few tiny pieces of butter, and bake for about 1/2 hour. A very good economical pudding may be made merely with apples, boiled and sweetened, with the addition of a few strips of lemon-peel. A layer of bread-crumbs should be placed above and below the apples, and the pudding baked for 1/2 hour.
TIME. About hour.
SEASONABLE from August to March.
Apple Batter Pudding, Baked. -INGREDIENTS for a pudding large enough for 5 or 6 persons.-1½ lb. of apples, lb. of finely-chopped suet, 3 eggs, 3 tablespoonfuls of flour, 1 pint of milk, a little grated nutmeg. AVERAGE COST, 11d. Mix the flour to a smooth batter with the milk, add the eggs, which should be well whisked, and put the batter into a wellbuttered pie-dish. Wipe the apples clean, but do not pare them; cut them in halves and take out the cores; lay them in the batter, rind uppermost; shake the suet on the top, over which also grate a little nutmeg; bake in a moderate oven for an hour, and sift over castor sugar when serving.
This pudding is also very good with the apples pared, sliced and mixed with the batter.
TIME.-1 hour.
Two puddings sit in this entry: a baked apple-and-breadcrumb pudding and an apple batter pudding. Both are straightforward, but the transcription has dropped some figures and the method omits one ingredient entirely.
- The sugar goes in with the applesThe ingredient list gives 6 oz of moist sugar but the method never mentions it. Add it while the apples are stewing, so it dissolves into the pulp; sweeten to taste, since modern dessert apples need far less than a Victorian cooking apple.
- Moist sugarAn unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, damp and clumping. Light brown soft sugar is the closest match; caster or granulated will work but gives a cleaner, less caramelly flavour.
- A pint of bread-crumbsThis is a volume measure, not a weight: an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so nearer 2½ US cups, or roughly 4-5 oz of fresh crumbs. Use fresh soft crumbs rather than dry packaged crumb, which will drink the apple juice and turn pasty.
- Oven temperatureThe first recipe gives no heat at all; the batter pudding says only "a moderate oven", usually reckoned at somewhere around 350F/180C. That will serve for both, the crumb pudding for its half hour, the batter pudding for the full hour.
- Cook the apples down properly"Reduced to a pulp" means a thick, dry purée that holds its shape on a spoon. Wet apple will soak the lower crumb layer into sludge, so drive off the moisture before the butter and eggs go in.
- Count the cloves outWhole cloves are used for infusion and removed before the butter and eggs. Three or four in 3 lb of apples is plenty; more and the pudding tastes medicinal.
- The suet weight is garbledThe batter pudding calls for "lb. of finely-chopped suet" with the fraction lost in transcription. A quarter pound (4 oz) would suit this quantity of batter; half a pound would be very rich. Shredded beef suet or vegetarian suet both work.
- Apples in the batterLeft unpared and cut rind-up, the halves steam inside their skins and the batter puffs around them, rather like a toad-in-the-hole. If you want a tidier pudding, take the variant given at the end and pare and slice them into the batter.
- YieldThe first pudding, at 3 lb of apples, should serve six to eight; the batter pudding is stated at five or six. Both want cream or a plain custard alongside.
Baked breadcrumb-and-apple puddings of this kind were a standard way of using stale bread and a glut of orchard fruit, and the note that the apples are "seasonable from August to March" reflects a household eating from the cellar rather than the shop. The dish belongs to the large family of English fruit puddings thickened with bread rather than pastry or flour, and the second, more economical version, apples and lemon peel between two layers of crumbs, sits close to the American Brown Betty, though that dish normally uses buttered crumbs. The batter pudding is a different tradition again, a sweet cousin of the Yorkshire pudding, in which whole apples bake into a suet-enriched batter. Beeton's costings, 1s. 6d. for the large pudding and 11d. for the batter one, were part of the book's appeal: their evident purpose was to let a mistress of the house reckon the cost of a dinner on paper before ordering anything.