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Apple Pudding
2 teaspoons baking powder 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 egg 1 scant cup m 4 apples 2 tablespoons sugar Make a dough of the first six ingredients and spread one half inch thick in a buttered pan. Pare and core the apples; cut them into eighths; spread them over the dough; sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake the pudding about twenty-five minutes. Serve with lemon or vanilla sauce.
Peach pudding may be made in the same way. 4 eggs
A biscuit-dough cobbler baked as a shallow sheet rather than a deep dish. The printed ingredient list has come down to us damaged, so read the method first and treat the list as a rough guide.
- The list is incomplete"1 scant cup m" is almost certainly milk, and the flour that a baking-powder dough requires never made it onto the page. The stray "4 eggs" at the end appears to belong to a neighbouring recipe. Any flour quantity here would be invention; a standard rich biscuit dough runs about 2 cups flour to 1 cup milk.
- "Make a dough"Cut or rub the butter into the flour, baking powder and half the cinnamon, then bind with the beaten egg and milk. Work it as little as possible — this is a biscuit, not a batter, and overmixing gives a tough base under the fruit.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Twenty-five minutes for a half-inch dough suggests a fairly brisk oven; something around 400°F works, and the pudding is done when the dough is browned at the edges and the apple slices are tender at the point of a knife.
- Pan sizeHalf an inch of dough from that quantity suits a pan of roughly 8 or 9 inches square rather than a large sheet.
- The applesFour apples cut in eighths is roughly 1½ lb of fruit. Use a firm cooking apple that holds its shape — Granny Smith, Northern Spy — and press the segments lightly into the dough so they do not slide off as it rises.
- SugarTwo tablespoons over four apples is barely sweet by current taste, and the sauce is presumably carrying the sugar. If you are serving it plain, three or four tablespoons is closer to what most palates now expect.
- The sauceA period lemon or vanilla sauce is a thin cornstarch pudding sauce: sugar and starch cooked with water or milk, finished with butter and flavouring, poured hot over the cut squares. Cream or a vanilla custard does the same job.
- YieldCuts into eight or nine squares. Best eaten warm the day it is baked; the dough goes heavy once refrigerated.
Puddings like this sit at the point where the English suet-and-crust tradition met American chemical leavening. A dough raised with baking powder, spread thin and baked under fruit is close kin to what American cooks now call a cobbler or a buckle, and the practice of calling such a dish a "pudding" persisted in printed cookbooks well into the twentieth century, when the word still covered almost any sweet dish served at the end of a meal rather than a set custard. The note that "peach pudding may be made in the same way" is a common cookbook economy: one master method with seasonal substitutions.