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Apple Bread Pudding
Mrs. G. L. Wheelock.
Pare, core, and chop one-half dozen sour apples; dry bread in the oven until crisp, then roll; butter a deep dish and place in it a layer of crumbs and apples alternately, with spice, and one-half cup of beef suet chopped fine; pour in one-half pint of sweet milk, and bake till nicely browned; serve with hard sauce. (
A plain suet-and-crumb pudding of the kind that used up stale bread and windfall apples. The instructions assume a cook who knows what a hard sauce is and how long a pudding wants in the oven; here are the numbers.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. A pudding of this type bakes at 350F for 45 to 60 minutes, until the top is browned and the apples are tender when pierced. Cover with foil if the crumbs colour before the fruit softens.
- Sour applesThis means tart cooking apples, not spoiled ones. Granny Smith, Bramley or Northern Spy all work; half a dozen medium apples is roughly 2 lb, yielding about 5 cups chopped.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that a nineteenth-century kitchen also kept on hand. Half a pint is one cup.
- Beef suetChopped raw suet from around the kidneys, which melts through the crumbs as the pudding bakes. Packaged shredded suet is sold in some markets; half a cup of cold butter, cut in small pieces and scattered between the layers, gives a similar result with a cleaner flavour.
- The crumbsDry the bread slowly in a low oven until it snaps rather than bends, then crush it. Crumbs that are still soft turn the pudding pasty instead of letting it set in distinct layers.
- Liquid is scantOne cup of milk over a dish of dried crumbs and 2 lb of apples is on the dry side by modern taste, though the apples release a good deal of juice. If your apples are firm and low in juice, an extra half cup of milk is reasonable.
- SpiceUnspecified, as was usual. Cinnamon with a little nutmeg and a pinch of clove suits it; about a teaspoon of mixed spice for the whole dish. No sugar is added to the apples themselves, so the sauce is doing that work.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with sifted powdered sugar, about twice as much sugar as butter, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or rosewater and chilled firm. It is spooned onto the hot pudding and melts into it.
- YieldA deep 2-quart dish, serving six.
Bread puddings like this one belong to the older logic of a household kitchen, where stale loaves were dried and stored rather than thrown out and where beef suet came home with the joint. The suet marks it as a cousin of English boiled puddings, which used the same fat to enrich a batter of crumbs or flour. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women, and Mrs. Wheelock's entry is characteristic of the genre: written cook to cook, with no oven temperature, no timing and no sugar quantity. Hard sauce, the near-universal accompaniment, is generally traced to English brandy butter served with Christmas pudding.