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Bread and Butter Apple Pudding
Cover bottom of a shallow baking-dish with apple sauce. Cut stale bread in one-third inch slices, spread with softened butter, remove crusts, and cut in triangular-shaped pieces; then arrange closely together over apple. Sprinkle generously with sugar, to which is added a few drops vanilla. Bake in a moderate oven and serve with cream.
A frugal Fannie Farmer pudding built from applesauce and buttered bread, with no quantities and no times given — the proportions are left to the dish you have.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no numbers; "a moderate oven" is conventionally read today as somewhere around 350F. Expect roughly 30 to 40 minutes, judging by eye: the bread triangles crisp and deep gold at the edges, the apple beneath bubbling.
- Quantities to work fromFor a shallow 8-inch or 9-inch baking dish, allow about 2 to 2½ cups of thick applesauce and 6 to 8 slices of stale bread. Serves four to six.
- The applesauce matters mostIt should be thick and barely sweetened — a loose, watery sauce will steam the bread from below and you lose the contrast the dish depends on. Cook it down first if it slackens on the spoon.
- Stale bread, not freshDay-old white bread with a firm crumb holds its shape and butters without tearing. Fresh sandwich bread collapses into the apple. A firm sourdough or country loaf works well.
- Butter the bread, don't melt itThe recipe says "softened butter" spread on the slices, which keeps the fat on the surface where it crisps as it bakes. Brushing with melted butter soaks the crumb and gives a soggier result.
- The vanilla sugarThe vanilla goes into the sugar rather than into the apple. Work it in with your fingertips so it isn't clumped, then scatter generously -- the sugar is what caramelises the tops.
- Serving"Cream" here is most likely plain heavy or light cream poured over the hot pudding rather than whipped, which the book names when it means it. Serve straight from the dish while the bread is still crisp; it softens quickly.
Bread and butter pudding is thrift cookery of a familiar kind — a way of using bread past its best, recorded in English kitchens since at least the eighteenth century — and this version simply swaps the usual custard for a layer of apple sauce, cutting both cost and richness. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carried a long section of hot puddings, dishes that had to be cheap enough to repeat. Applesauce appears here as an assumed ingredient rather than something the recipe bothers to teach. Farmer's book is full of small instructions about appearance and arrangement, part of her project to make plain domestic cooking systematic and presentable.