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Pouding aux Pommes
Take a pound of apples and peel them. Cook them, and rub them, when soft, through a sieve to make them into a puree. Sweeten it well, and scent it with a scrap of vanilla; then let it get cold. Beat up three eggs, both whites and yolks, and mix them into your cold compote, and put all in a dish that will stand the heat of the oven. Then place on the top a bit of butter the size of a filbert and powder all over with white sugar. Place the dish in an oven with a gentle heat for half-an-hour, watching how it cooks. This dish can be eaten hot or cold.
An apple souffle-custard with no flour, no milk and no butter beyond a token knob — the eggs alone set it. The whole dish turns on the apple puree being cold before the eggs go in.
- Cool the puree firstHot puree will scramble the eggs and the pudding will weep. Spread it thin and let it come to room temperature or below before beating in the eggs, as the recipe insists.
- "Gentle heat"The recipe gives no temperature; a moderate-to-low oven, somewhere around 325F, is a reasonable modern reading. Anything much hotter puffs the eggs fast and then collapses them. The recipe allows half an hour, and it is done when the centre is just barely wobbly.
- A pound of applesThat is weight before peeling — roughly three medium apples, giving about 1 1/2 cups of puree. A tart cooking apple such as Bramley breaks down to a puree with little help; firmer varieties, Granny Smith among them, and eating apples may need mashing after cooking.
- Sweetening is left to you"Sweeten it well" is genuinely unquantified. Between 1/3 and 1/2 cup of sugar suits a tart apple, and it should be stirred in while the puree is hot so it dissolves.
- A scrap of vanillaThis means a short length of vanilla pod. Note that the recipe scents the puree after sieving rather than cooking the pod with the apples. Half a teaspoon of extract, stirred into the warm puree, is the direct substitute.
- Butter the size of a filbertA filbert is a hazelnut, so about a teaspoon or two — dotted on top purely to help the sugar brown, not to enrich the pudding.
- SievingA food mill or a coarse sieve will do the job the recipe asks for and give a smooth puree.
- Yield and servingEnough for four in a 1-quart baking dish. Hot it eats as a light souffle; cold it firms into something closer to a set apple custard. The recipe itself says it can be eaten hot or cold.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it was published to raise money for their relief. The pudding is a plain one: apples, eggs, sugar and a hazelnut of butter, with no milk, cream or flour. Baked apple purees set with eggs are old and widespread across northern Europe, and this is the plainest form of them. The instruction to watch how it cooks is a reminder that these recipes were dictated by cooks who worked without thermometers or reliable ovens, and who expected the reader to judge by eye.