Hannah Glasse’s 1747 Recipe for ‘Apricot Pudding’
“Codle six large Apricots very tender, break them very small, sweeten them to your Taste. When they are cold, add six Eggs, only two Whites well beat, mix them well together with a Pint of good Cream, lay a Puff paste all over your Dish, and pour in your Ingredients. Bake it Half an Hour ; don’t let the Oven be too hot ; when it is enough throw a little fine Sugar all over it, and send it to Table hot.”
Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, second edition (1747)
The ‘Moorpark’ apricots at work are just starting to ripen – we’ll start picking them next week and will be putting them out on the produce stand – and so it seems like an appropriate time to share Hannah Glasse’s recipe for a distinctly custardy-sounding Apricot Pudding.
It seems a nicely simple recipe to follow. Gently simmer six large apricots until they soften, then mash them and add sugar to taste. Let them cool, then add six whole eggs and two extra egg whites – bearing in mind that mid-eighteenth century eggs would probably have been a bit smaller than the ones our modern chickens can produce, so maybe just five medium-sized eggs or four large? – and a pint of cream, double rather than single, and mix it all together.
The cooking stage might be a bit trickier. Hannah tells us to “lay a Puff paste all over your Dish”, i.e. line a pie-dish with puff pastry. Again, the type of pastry she has in mind might not be the same stuff that comes out of a packet from the supermarket, but in this case we can take a look at her own recipe for puff paste – from The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy second edition, page 145 – and see what she had in mind:
“Take a Quarter of a Peck of Flour, rub fine Half a Pound of Butter, a little Salt, make it up into a light Paste with cold Water, just stiff enough to work it well up then roll it out, and stick Pieces of Butter all over, and strew a little Flour ; roll it up, and roll it out again ; and so do nine or ten Times, till you have rolled in a Pound and Half of Butter. This Crust is mostly used for all Sorts of Pies.”
Okay, so it’s pretty similar to modern puff pastry. Maybe you’ll get away with the packet stuff after all. Blind baking isn’t suggested. Instead you just pour in the apricot custard mix and bake it for around half an hour in a moderate oven. That’s around 180°C / 350-375°F / Gas Mark 4-51According to this handy guide from Women’s Weekly Australia.. Your oven may be warmer or cooler than Hannah’s of course, so keep an eye on it and maybe call it done when there’s still a bit of loose wobble in the middle. It should finish cooking as it cools.
This also sounds like an eminently adaptable recipe for pretty much any type of summer fruits: redcurrants, whitecurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries, even strawberries. Potential variants abound.
How about you? Do you like the sound of Hannah Glasse’s ‘Apricot Pudding’? Is it something you’d be tempted to try? Do please let me know if so, via the comments.
Footnotes
- 1According to this handy guide from Women’s Weekly Australia. ↩︎
I’ll probably try making this sometime soon. I have some local apricots I diced and froze, and Google tells me 6 large apricots would fit into 2 1/4 to 3 cups.
After the cream is added, I plan to make good use of an immersion blender to better purée the apricots.
I’ll probably use a Quick Puff Pastry recipe from the City Tavern cookbook I’ve used once before.
I’m much more probable to use Extra Large eggs, drop the whole eggs down to 4, and retain 1 or both egg whites, because I think the ratio was intended to create a light meringue texture or crunch to the finished filling, after baking.
The yolks adding body like in custard ice cream recipes. It’ll be fascinating to see if that really happens.
My flour isn’t AP; it’s milled at home from organic grain, so it might be closer to Hannah’s pastry dough, and I should consult her advice in Puff Pastry dough, too, before going forward.
Thank you for oven temp conversions!
Hi Ficus – That sounds like an excellent plan to me. I’d love to know how it turns out, please do keep me posted!