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Apple and Almond Pudding
Peel and core some cooking apples, put them in a saucepan with a little water, and cook to a pulp. Put this at the bottom of a buttered basin or mould, and let it cool. Put five ounces of blanched almonds into a mortar with an equal weight of crushed loaf-sugar, pounding well and mixing in the yolks of seven eggs, the strained juice and grated rind of a lemon and a little flour to thicken it. When these are well mixed, add the whites of the seven eggs beaten to a froth, turn the whole into the basin or mould over the apples, place in a moderate oven and bake for about half an hour, when the pudding should be of a light brown. Take out when done and turn it onto a dish, serving with sweet sauce.
A baked almond sponge set over an apple base and turned out — closer to an English pudding than to anything American. Two things decide whether it works: how dry the apple layer is, and how gently the whites are folded in.
- Cook the apple down hardThe apple must be a thick, spoonable pulp, not a sauce — any free liquid will steam the underside of the almond batter and it will slump when turned out. Cook uncovered until a spoon drawn through leaves a clear track, and cool it completely before the batter goes on.
- Moderate oven350F. At much more the almond mixture browns before the centre sets; the recipe's "light brown" in about half an hour is a good check at that temperature.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones or blocks, broken up and crushed for use. Granulated sugar is the equivalent, and caster sugar dissolves faster into the yolks.
- Mortar and almondsPounding 5 oz almonds with an equal weight of sugar takes a long while by hand. A food processor does it, but the sugar is not optional — ground alone, almonds heat and turn to paste. Pulse in short bursts to a coarse meal.
- "A little flour"Genuinely unquantified. One to two tablespoons is a plausible amount for a pudding of this type; more than that and the almond flavour goes flat. Add it to the yolk mixture before the whites.
- Basin or mouldA pudding basin of roughly 1.5 to 2 quarts. Despite the basin, this is baked, not steamed — butter it thoroughly and dust with fine crumbs or ground almonds so the apple layer releases when inverted. Let it stand five minutes before turning out.
- Folding the whitesSeven whites are the only leavening. Fold them into a mixture that is already fairly stiff, in two or three additions, and stop while a few streaks remain.
- Sweet sauceA thin pouring custard, or a lemon or brandy sauce. Yield is roughly six to eight servings.
Puddings built on pounded almonds, sugar and a great many egg yolks run back through English and French domestic cookery well before Oscar Tschirky set them down; the technique is usually traced to the medieval almond-and-sugar pastes that lie behind marzipan, lightened here by whipped whites in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manner. Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, put his name to an 1896 collection that reflects the working repertoire of a hotel kitchen staffed by European-trained cooks — how much he assembled himself and how much came from existing printed sources is not clear — which is why the instructions assume a mortar, a pudding basin and a cook who knows what "a little flour" means. The apple layer is the thrifty part: a pulp of cooking apples underneath turns an expensive almond batter into a dish that will feed a table.