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New England Pandowdy
Fill a deep earthen or porcelain-lined pudding dish with peeled and cored tart apples. Add one or two tablespoons water to make a little juice, sprinkle with sugar, season with nutmeg or cinnamon and cover with a baking-powder biscuit crust. Bake in a moderate oven (350° F.) for 40 minutes, and serve with a sauce of thick cream well sweetened with ordinary sugar or scraped maple sugar. Any sweetened stewed, canned or fresh fruit may be used instead of the apples.
A plain fruit cobbler under another name, and unusually easy to follow since the book already gives a temperature. What it does not give is quantities, so a few decisions are yours.
- Dish and quantityA "deep pudding dish" here is roughly a 2-quart baking dish; figure 2 to 2 1/2 lb of apples, or about six medium, sliced thick rather than left whole. The instruction to use earthenware or porcelain-lined ware is about acid: tart fruit in bare cast iron or unlined copper picks up a metallic taste and dulls in color.
- Sugar is unmeasuredFor 2 lb of genuinely tart apples, 1/2 to 3/4 cup of sugar tossed through the fruit is a reasonable range. Taste a slice raw and adjust; many older apple varieties were sharper than the dessert apples now sold in supermarkets.
- "Ordinary sugar"Granulated white sugar, as distinct from the scraped maple sugar offered as the alternative. Maple sugar in a hard cake was still common in New England kitchens and was shaved off as needed; maple syrup stirred into the cream is a fair substitute.
- The biscuit crustAny standard baking-powder biscuit dough rolled to about 1/2 inch, laid over the fruit in one sheet, and slashed to vent. Do not seal it to the rim all the way around or steam will lift it off the fruit.
- Whether to "dowdy" itOlder versions of the dish break the crust down into the juices partway through baking, which is generally held to be where the name comes from. This recipe omits the step, so it bakes as a straightforward cobbler. If you want the traditional texture, cut through the crust and push it under the syrup after about 25 minutes, then finish baking.
- Timing and donenessForty minutes at 350°F browns the crust reliably but may leave firm apples underdone. Slice the fruit no thicker than 1/2 inch, or give it 10 to 15 minutes in the dish before the crust goes on; a knife should pass through the apples without resistance.
- The cream sauceThick cream well sweetened means heavy cream with sugar beaten in, poured rather than whipped stiff. Modern ultra-pasteurized cream tends not to thicken on standing as older unhomogenized cream did, so whip it lightly if you want body.
- YieldServes six. Best warm, within an hour of baking, while the crust bottom is still distinct from the fruit.
Pandowdy belongs to the large New England family of fruit-and-dough puddings that also includes cobbler, grunt, slump and brown betty, all of them ways of stretching a barrel of keeping apples through a winter. The name is generally traced to the dish's homely appearance once the crust has been broken into the juice, though the etymology is traditional rather than documented, as is the reported use of "to dowdy" as a kitchen verb. That this version skips the dowdying, specifies a baking-powder crust rather than the older suet or short paste, and gives an oven temperature in degrees marks it as a twentieth-century rewrite: chemical leavening and thermometer-equipped ranges had both become ordinary by the time the book appeared, and the closing line inviting canned fruit as a substitute says as much about the commercial cannery as it does about the pudding.