With Apples
The preceding, with 2 quarts of apples in quarters, instead of raisins. The easiest cooking apples may be dropped in raw, but others need to be baked in the pan with sugar and butter syrup first, and the batter poured over them and baked.
However good a plain pudding may look to hungry people, there are always others to exert themselves to make a better. The credit of the origination of the following is given to a duchess of Sunderland. As here changed from cup and spoon measure it is O. K.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it takes the preceding raisin batter pudding and swaps in apples. Read the base recipe first, then apply these notes.
- The hingeFirm apples must be part-cooked before the batter goes on. Raw slices of a dense variety will still be crunching when the batter has set, and the batter will sink into the gaps left as they shrink. Bake them in the buttered sugar syrup until they yield to a knife tip, then pour the batter over while the fruit is hot.
- "2 quarts of apples in quarters"A dry-volume measure of prepared fruit, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb, or five to six medium apples, peeled and quartered. Loose-packed quarters vary a good deal, so weigh rather than measure if the base batter is fixed.
- "The easiest cooking apples"Varieties that collapse fast: Bramley, McIntosh, Gravenstein, or a soft windfall. Anything bred to hold its shape in a pie — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Honeycrisp — belongs in the pre-baked category.
- Sugar and butter syrupNo proportion is given here or implied: butter and sugar melted together in the baking pan, no water. It caramelizes around the fruit and keeps the bottom of the pudding from going pallid. About 2 oz of each per pound of apples is a reasonable modern starting point, not the book's figure.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A batter pudding of this sort wants 375F — hot enough to set and lift the batter, not hot enough to scorch the sugar syrup underneath. Reckon 40 to 50 minutes for a full pan, and test the center with a skewer.
- "Cup and spoon measure"Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant kitchens and often recast domestic recipes into weights. Note that this sentence, like the one before it, points forward to the recipe that follows rather than back to the apple variation; "it is O. K." reads as his assurance about his own conversion, though he does not say he tested it.
- YieldWith two quarts of apples this fills a large pan — figure a 9x13-inch dish and ten to twelve servings. Serve warm with cream or a hard sauce; a batter pudding turns leaden once cold.
Batter puddings baked over fruit are often said to be among the older surviving forms of English pudding, the same principle that produces Yorkshire pudding under meat drippings and clafoutis over cherries: a loose egg batter poured onto something hot and set in the oven. The reference to "a duchess of Sunderland" belongs not to this apple pudding but to the recipe that follows it, and in any case such genteel provenance is the kind nineteenth-century cookbooks attached to a dish to raise its standing; it should be read as traditional rather than documented ing app" appears in various English collections as a plain baked batter, with no reliable line back to any particular duchess.