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Crow's Nest
1/2 lb. (2 cups) flour 1/2 pint (I cup) milk 2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) sugar 2 eggs 1/2 gill (1/4 cup) cream 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 1 teaspoonful baking powder Peel, core, and slice enough apples to one-half fill a buttered baking dish. Sieve the flour, baking powder and sugar into a basin, stir in gradually the milk, cream and lemon extract.
Whisk up the eggs, mix these with the flour ingredients, and beat thoroughly for eight minutes, then pour the mixture over the apples until they are covered. Bake for one hour and serve the pudding hot with cream, sweetened and flavored with a little powdered nutmeg. This pudding tastes like apple dumplings, though it is more quickly and more easily made.
A batter pudding baked over sliced apples, closer to a clafoutis than to the dumplings it claims to imitate. The original gives no oven temperature and no dish size, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350F. An hour at moderate heat sets the custardy batter through without scorching the top; if the surface colors early, cover loosely with foil for the last 15 minutes.
- Dish size and yieldA 2-quart baking dish, about 8 or 9 inches square, is right. That takes roughly 4 to 5 medium apples half-filling it, and the pudding serves 6.
- The eight minutes of beatingCut this to one or two minutes, just until smooth. Prolonged beating can develop gluten and give a tougher, rubbery pudding.
- Baking powder strengthOne teaspoon for 2 cups of flour is light by modern standards, and the batter is thin. Two teaspoons of a current double-acting powder gives a better rise.
- A gillA gill is a quarter pint, so the half gill of cream is the quarter cup the recipe already states. The measures are all doubled up like this and can be read straight.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon of extract is assertive in modern formulations. The finely grated zest of one lemon is closer to what was intended and less perfumed.
- ApplesUse a variety that holds its shape and has some acid, such as Granny Smith or Northern Spy; Bramley cooks down to a puree. Sweet dessert apples collapse into sauce under an hour of baking and thin the batter from below.
- Serving creamThe finishing cream is meant to be lightly sweetened, whipped or pouring, with nutmeg grated in. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg has largely lost the point.
Crow's nest pudding is an old American, chiefly New England, name for the family of baked puddings in which fruit sits at the bottom of the dish and batter is poured over it; the name is traditionally explained by the fruit peeping through the crust like eggs in a nest, though that reading is folk explanation rather than documented origin. It turns up in nineteenth-century American household cookbooks, sometimes made with a suet or biscuit crust rather than batter, and apple versions are common, apples being a fruit many households could keep through winter in a cellar. The note that it "tastes like apple dumplings, though it is more quickly and more easily made" suggests why it persisted: dumplings mean rolling, cutting and wrapping individual portions of pastry, while this needs one bowl and one dish.