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Marlborough Pudding or Pie
1 pint of stewed apples. 8 ounces of sugar. 1 cupful of milk. 4 ounces of butter. 4 eggs. Little sherry wine and nutmeg. Mix all together. Bake in crusts.
A terse professional formula for what New Englanders call Marlborough pie: an apple custard baked in a pastry shell. The proportions are sound, but the book assumes a baker who already knows what to do with them.
- What "stewed apples" meansA pint of tart apples cooked down soft and unsweetened, roughly the texture of thick applesauce — about 2 cups, from some 1 1/2 lb of apples. Plain unsweetened applesauce works; sweetened versions will push the pie past cloying, since the recipe already carries 8 ounces of sugar.
- The hinge: this is a custard, not a fruit pieFour eggs and a cup of milk make the apple into a baked custard. It must be treated as one — pulled while the centre still has a slight wobble, since carryover heat finishes the set. Baked until firm all the way through, it weeps and turns grainy.
- Oven temperatureStart at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 325-350F for another 30-40 minutes. A steady moderate oven throughout is safer for the custard but gives a soggier bottom.
- "Bake in crusts"Marlborough pie is traditionally made with a bottom crust only, in a 9-inch plate; the plural here probably indicates several shells rather than a top and bottom. Partially blind-baking the shell before filling is worth the trouble, as the wet custard will otherwise soak the base before the oven can set it.
- Butter and sugar handlingMelt the 4 ounces of butter and let it cool before it meets the eggs, or it will scramble them. Beat the sugar into the eggs first, then add the milk, butter and apple.
- Sherry and nutmeg"A little" means about 2 tablespoons of sherry and a quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg. Many period Marlborough recipes also add lemon juice and zest, which this one omits; a tablespoon of juice sharpens a pie that can otherwise read flat.
- YieldEnough filling for two 9-inch pies, or one very deep one. Serve cool or barely warm — the flavour of the nutmeg and sherry is muted while it is hot.
Marlborough pie is a New England dish, closely tied to Thanksgiving in Massachusetts. It belongs to a family of English apple-custard tarts that crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its name is generally traced either to the town of Marlborough, Massachusetts, or to the Duke of Marlborough, though neither attribution is documented. Recipes for it appear steadily in American cookbooks from Amelia Simmons onward, usually with grated apple or apple sauce, sherry or lemon, and a heavy hand with nutmeg — a reminder of how much eighteenth-century wine-and-spice cookery survived in American pastry long after it had faded from the savoury table.