Monday, December 7, 2009

Amber Pudding: 1889

This is from the February 2, 1889 edition of Good Housekeeping.


Line a dish with pie-crust and fill with this mixture: Six tart apples stewed (covered) three-fourths of an hour,


It would probably be cheaper to just use apple sauce.
the juice and rind of one lemon, two tablespoonfuls of butter, one-fourth of a cupful of water. Rub through a colander and add one cupful of sugar, the yolks of three beaten eggs.

I skipped adding extra water and put the apples through a blender instead of a colander. Also, I added all the ingredients after the apples were blended.


Bake one-half hour, and cover with meringue, the stiff whites of three eggs, one-half of a cupful of sugar, and brown.
I baked the pie at 375 degrees F and the meringue at 350 degrees F (for 15 minutes). I made the crust without lard, it was just plain old butter, flour, salt and water.



The results were interesting. It kind of tasted like lemon meringue pie, but distinctly different. I don't think the pudding was supposed to set; it only had three egg yolks in it after all. On the plus side, I didn't have to worry about a dry crust; this thing is its own sauce. It tasted good so I might make it again.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

LOVE these recipe resurrections! I may try this apple meringue pie, but I will try adding some fruit pectin, corn starch or Sure-Gel to see if I can get it to it set up, and blind bake the crust first like I would do for a modern cream meringue pie. Small updates to make it more accessible and serve-able!

Michael Haz said...

That looks great. I think I'd heat some cornstarch in apple juice, temper the egg yolks, then combine and cook. That would thicken the mixture to the consistency of a custard pie.

Jason (the commenter) said...

Thickeners like corn starch, etc. sound like a good idea.

It could also be that our eggs are smaller than eggs in 1899, so maybe four would work better than three.

What I found strange was that the recipe said to add extra water. This is a February recipe though, and who knows what shape their apples would have been in.

Anyway, everybody knows what they can try if they have a bunch of apples or apple sauce to get rid of!