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Apples
1/2 teaspoonful clove 1/2 teaspoonful cinna- Light bread dough cup molasses ½ cup sugar ter Pieces stale bread teaspoonful clove teaspoonful cinnamon 2 tablespoonfuls but-1/4 teaspoonful nutmeg Fill a good-sized baking-dish with juicy apples pared and quartered, cover with a crust made of bread dough (or pastry, page 27), and bake until apples are soft and crust brown. Take off crust while adding to apples the butter, molasses, sugar, spice, and pieces of bread. (Amount of bread may vary.) Replace crust, having brown side down, and spread with some of the apple. Cover closely with a pan and bake in moderate oven two hours.
Turn out on flat dish and serve cold with cream.
A deep apple pudding baked under a bread-dough lid, then turned out and served cold — closer to a brown betty or an apple charlotte than to a pie. The ingredient quantities as printed are incomplete, so treat the amounts below as working proportions.
- The hinge: two bakes, not oneThe first bake softens the apples and browns the crust; only then do the butter, molasses, sugar, spice and bread go in. Adding everything at the outset would likely leave the bread broken down into the fruit rather than holding as a sliceable mould, though the recipe does not say so.
- Moderate oven350F. The second, covered bake at two hours is long but gentle — it is there to let the bread absorb the apple juices and set, not to cook the fruit further. Cover tightly with foil if you have no pan that fits over the dish.
- Uncertain quantitiesThe printed list has lost its numbers in places. For a 2-quart dish, roughly 3 lb apples, 1/2 cup molasses, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 teaspoon each of clove, cinnamon and nutmeg, and 3 to 4 slices of stale bread torn up, works with the method as written. The recipe itself concedes the bread may vary.
- Light bread doughA plain risen white yeast dough — the same you would use for a loaf, rolled thin. Bread machines and supermarket pizza dough both stand in. The original offers pastry (page 27) as an alternative to the bread dough.
- Juicy applesChoose a variety that breaks down: Bramley, McIntosh, Cortland. Firm modern eating apples such as Gala or Honeycrisp hold their shape and will not give up the juice the bread needs to soak in.
- Turning it outButter the dish well before you start, and run a knife round the edge before inverting. The crust goes back in brown-side down precisely so it ends up on top when the pudding is upended.
- CloveA full teaspoon of ground clove alongside the nutmeg is assertive by current taste; halving it is an option.
- Yield and servingA 2-quart dish gives roughly 8 servings. The recipe directs that it be served cold with cream, so it can be made a day ahead.
Left-over cookery of this kind sat at the centre of Anglo-American household economy well into the twentieth century, and books devoted entirely to the subject were common enough to form a small genre. Stale bread was the most reliably surplus thing in any kitchen that baked its own loaves, and the standard remedies for it — puddings, betties, charlottes, panades — all work on the same principle: bread as a sponge for fruit juice, sugar and fat. The technique here, of baking under a crust and then inverting, is the same one that produces an apple charlotte, generally traced to English and French practice of the early nineteenth century. Molasses rather than all sugar marks this as an American version, and points to a household watching its costs in more than one direction.