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New England Pandowdy
Fill a deep earthen or porcelain-lined pudding dish with peeled and cored tart apples. Add one or two tablespoons water to make a little juice, sprinkle with sugar, season with nutmeg or cinnamon and cover with a baking-powder biscuit crust. Bake in a moderate oven (350 degrees F.) for 40 minutes, and serve with a sauce of thick cream well sweetened with ordinary sugar or scraped maple sugar. Any sweetened stewed, canned or fresh fruit may be used instead of the apples.
A deep-dish apple pudding under a biscuit lid, with the quantities left to the cook's judgment in the manner of the period. A few decisions have to be made before it goes in the oven.
- Sugar is unmeasuredThe original says only "sprinkle with sugar." For a dish holding about 2 lb of tart apples, 1/2 to 3/4 cup is the usual range; hold to the lower end if the cream sauce will be well sweetened.
- Slice the applesWhole peeled and cored apples will still be firm at 40 minutes under a crust. Thick slices, about 1/2 inch, cook through in the stated time and give the juice something to thicken against.
- The dish"Earthen or porcelain-lined" simply means non-reactive. A 2-quart stoneware, glass or enameled baking dish is right; bare cast iron or unlined aluminum will pick up a metallic taste from the apple acid.
- Biscuit crustRoll a standard baking-powder biscuit dough about 1/2 inch thick, lay it over the fruit and cut two or three vents. Rolled thicker it will stay damp underneath where it meets the steaming apples.
- OvenThe temperature is given: at 350F, expect 40 to 50 minutes; the crust should be well browned and the juice bubbling up at the vents.
- Maple sugarScraped maple sugar means hard cakes of maple grated to a powder. Granulated maple sugar can stand in for it by volume; maple syrup will also serve, at roughly two-thirds the volume of syrup to sugar, and expect a looser cream.
- Dowdying, if you want itMany New England versions break the crust down into the fruit partway through baking so it soaks with juice. This recipe does not call for it, though it is commonly said to be the step the name refers to.
- YieldA 2-quart dish serves six. Best served warm rather than hot, an hour or so out of the oven, when the juices have set slightly.
Pandowdy belongs to the family of plain New England fruit puddings baked under a lid of dough, alongside grunts, slumps and cobblers, and the boundaries between them were never firmly drawn. The name is generally traced to the homely, "dowdy" appearance of the finished dish, and in most accounts to the practice of breaking the crust into the fruit before serving. Older versions were often sweetened with molasses or maple sugar, refined white sugar being costlier in rural households, which may be why this version still offers scraped maple sugar as an alternative and specifies "ordinary sugar" for the other. That the recipe gives an actual oven temperature places it after the spread of thermostatic gas and electric ranges, when "a moderate oven" could be stated as a number rather than judged by hand.