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Steamed Apple Pudding
Put a thick layer of sliced apples in a kettle, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and cook over a low fire until they are soft. Make a biscuit dough and place over the apples, cover the kettle tightly and steam dough fifteen or twenty minutes. Serve with cream or hard sauce.
A cobbler cooked entirely on the stovetop, with the biscuit topping steamed over the fruit rather than baked. The original assumes you know its proportions, so the notes below fill in the blanks.
- Do not lift the lidThe dough rises and sets on trapped steam alone. Opening the pot partway through drops the temperature and leaves you with a pale, sodden top; check only after fifteen minutes, and then only once.
- The kettleIn this period a kettle is any deep, heavy lidded pot, not a tea kettle. Use a Dutch oven or a wide saucepan with a tight-fitting lid, ideally 10 inches across so the dough sits in a single layer.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives none. For a 10-inch pot, figure 6 to 8 medium tart apples (roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb), 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, and a teaspoon of cinnamon; a biscuit dough from 2 cups flour is enough to cover.
- Enough liquid to make steamJuicy apples throw off their own moisture, but firm storage apples may not. If the pan looks dry once the fruit softens, add 2 to 3 tablespoons of water before laying on the dough, or the bottom will scorch.
- Low fireOnce the dough is on, keep the heat at a bare simmer. The fruit should bubble gently at the edges; anything more and the underside of the biscuit boils rather than steams.
- TimingFifteen to twenty minutes is accurate for a topping about half an inch thick. It is done when a skewer comes out of the dough clean and the surface is dry and springy rather than tacky.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavoring — vanilla, nutmeg, or brandy — then chilled until firm. It is meant to melt into the hot pudding, so serve it cold and in slices or spoonfuls.
- YieldServes 6, and it does not keep well; the steamed dough turns heavy once it cools. Spoon it out at the table with the apples underneath.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed to policyholders as part of its welfare and home-economics work, in editions running from around the First World War onward, which suits the tone throughout: cheap ingredients, few of them, and no equipment beyond a pot with a lid. A steamed apple pudding like this one belongs to the older English tradition of boiled and steamed puddings, which persisted in American kitchens well into the twentieth century. It is essentially a cobbler turned inside out — the same fruit and biscuit dough that a baked cobbler uses, cooked by steam on the stovetop rather than in the oven.