Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Apple Pudding
Apple Pudding
Mrs. Snider.
Pare and slice half a dozen cooking-apples; grease a pudding-dish, put a thicklayer of grated bread crumbs, add bits of butter, then a layer of apples, with sugar and nutmeg, and repeat until the dish is full; pour over the whole a teacup of cold water, and bake thirty minutes.
A brown betty in all but name, and one written for cooks who already knew what a pudding-dish looked like. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the size of the teacup, and the baking time.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; collections of this kind routinely left it to the cook's judgement. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits this; the aim is to soften the apples and crisp the top without scorching the butter.
- Thirty minutes is not enoughThirty minutes may not be enough -- raw sliced apples in a deep dish can need 45 to 60 minutes at 350F. Test with a knife tip through the centre layer.
- A teacup of waterTeacup measures varied; reckon on somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup (4 to 6 fl oz). It is there to steam the apples and hydrate the crumbs, not to make a sauce, so do not increase it.
- Grated bread crumbsThis means day-old bread grated on a box grater into coarse, irregular crumbs, not the fine sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Coarse crumbs absorb the butter and stay distinct; commercial crumbs turn to paste.
- Cooking-applesA firm tart variety that holds its shape: Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Half a dozen medium apples is about 2 lb pared and sliced.
- Butter and sugarNo quantities are given. Figure on 3 to 4 tablespoons of butter dotted through the layers and about half a cup of sugar total, adjusted to the tartness of the fruit.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over each apple layer. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma within months and the pudding has little else flavouring it.
- Finishing and yieldCover for the first half of the bake if the top browns quickly, then uncover to crisp. A standard 8-inch square or 2-quart dish serves six, warm, with cream.
Layered puddings of buttered crumbs and sliced apple were standard household economy on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century: they used up stale bread, needed no pastry-making skill, and could go into the oven alongside whatever else was baking. The type is generally identified with the American brown betty, a name often said to appear in print from around the 1860s, though the evidence is patchy, and recipes like this one often appear unnamed or simply as "apple pudding." The attribution to Mrs. Snider is typical of the community cookbook, a genre of charitable and church fundraising collections appearing from at least the 1860s, in which the recipes of named local women were collected and sold, usually for a church or charitable fund; the contributor's name functioned as both credit and guarantee. The brevity here is characteristic of the form, and quantities of butter and sugar go unstated.