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Apple Custard Pudding
A L'AMERICAINE. 2 quarts of dry stewed apples or baked apple pulp. 1 pound of sugar. 1/2 pound of butter. 20 yolks of eggs. Lemon, nutmeg, or cinnamon flavor. Mash the drained apples through a strainer. Mix in the other ingredients. Bake in a bright pan previously buttered. Use as pudding with either sweetened cream or wine sauce.
Here we have reached a boundary line. One step more would be out of the domains of pudding and over the borders of pie, for the last apple custard with a little milk added makes nice apple cream pie. "Well, thank goodness, it was not a bread pudding, for we are so tired of bread puddings." "When did we have any bread puddings? We have had queen of puddings, plum puddings, baked fruit pudding, lemon pudding, cocoanut pudding, charlottes, and souffles and meringues." "They all have bread in them, more or less, except the boiled roll puddings, and they are made of biscuit dough." "But they all and many more were made with bread, more or less, before our time; and they are none of the rough, unsightly bread crust abominations, but delicate compounds of fine, white crumbs." "There is no fault to be found with the puddings, but don't you see there's no more bread in the house?" "Oh, well there are many good substitutes when bread cannot be obtained, but you will manage to admit just one more that is made with bread, more or less, both because it is a boiled pudding for a change, and has already once been called by name but never appeared. It is one of the best."
This is a hotel-kitchen formula written for a bakeshop, not a household: two quarts of apple pulp and twenty yolks will fill a large pan and feed a crowd. Scale it down and treat it as what it is, a baked custard thickened with fruit rather than milk.
- Scale it for homeThe full batch is roughly 20 to 24 servings. A quarter batch works cleanly: 2 cups drained apple pulp, 4 oz sugar, 2 oz butter, 5 yolks, baked in a buttered 8-inch pan or a 1-quart dish.
- The apples must be dryThis is the hinge. "Dry stewed apples or baked apple pulp" means fruit cooked down and drained until it holds its shape on a spoon; wet applesauce will weep and the custard will never set. Baking whole apples and scooping the flesh gives the driest pulp.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 325 to 350F. Custards of this kind curdle and turn grainy above about 350F, and a pan of this depth will take 45 minutes to an hour at the lower end.
- "A bright pan"A new or well-scoured tin pan, shiny rather than blackened. Dark pans absorb more heat and set the edges before the middle. A light-colored metal pan or a shallow ceramic dish is the modern equivalent.
- Melt the butterHalf a pound to two quarts of pulp is a rich ratio, and cold butter will not disperse in fruit purée. Melt it and stir it into the warm apples before the yolks go in, then add the yolks off the heat so they do not scramble.
- Judging donenessThe center should wobble as a set mass, not slosh. A knife an inch from the edge comes out clean while the middle is still slightly soft; carryover heat finishes it.
- FlavoringLemon means grated zest and a little juice, nutmeg means freshly grated, cinnamon means ground. Choose one rather than all three; the quantities are left to the cook, and about a teaspoon of spice or the zest of two lemons per quart of pulp is in keeping.
- The wine sauceThe recipe does not specify one. Period wine sauces were commonly butter and sugar loosened with sherry or Madeira, sometimes enriched with egg. Sweetened cream, poured cold over the warm pudding, is the simpler option.
- The pie variantThe author's aside is accurate: the same mixture with a little milk added becomes a pourable pie filling. The recipe gives no proportion of milk and says nothing about the shell.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than for households, which is why the quantities arrive in quarts and pounds and why the book breaks off into staged kitchen dialogue between chapters. The dish itself sits in an old English line of fruit-and-egg puddings -- the apple "amber" -- in which stewed fruit stands in for the milk of a plain baked custard and the yolks do all the setting. The grumbling about bread puddings is worth reading as evidence: bread, breadcrumbs and biscuit dough were common structural elements in sweet puddings of the period, and the dialogue itself presents this dish as what a cook reached for when the loaf ran out. The heading a l'americaine appears to mark it as a native adaptation within a largely French pastry vocabulary.