Eve's Apples

Photo © Rob Jones

Last week’s unseasonal storm delivered an unexpected harvest of windfalls.

Even before the wind had died down I was out with a plastic bag collecting the as yet unbruised and un-wasp-eaten treasures.

Big question then was what to do with them.

I ruled out a crumble as I’d made one quite recently. I needed to look into fritters and turnovers, tarts and strudels, as needed extra research. A pudding it must be.

Eve’s Pudding

There are recipes for Eve’s Pudding aplenty. and I’ll limit my self to some cultural references and a couple of twists I employed in the making.

The name of the pudding has nothing to do with the biblical Eve it seems as I had supposed, though I can imagine that if she had tempted Adam with an Eve’s Pudding, smothered in custard, it would have been almost impossible to resist. (ignore the fact she probably didn’t have a cooker or half the ingredients in the Garden of Eden at the time.)

No, Eve’s Pudding - known as Mother Eve’s Pudding in some places - is actually named after the variety of apple used. It’s similar to a recipe from 1824 for the Duke of Cumberland’s Pudding, which used grated bread, suet and a lot of eggs..

If it’s the Duke of Cumberland I’m thinking of, then he was nicknamed ‘the Butcher’ for his tactics on the battlefield during the battle of Culloden. He was born in Leicester House in what is now Leicester Square in London, roughly where the Empire Cinema is now.

Essentially it’s baked apples covered with a Victoria Sponge cake mix.

I part stewed the apples in with some brown sugar, making sure they didn’t lose too much of their shape, and smeared a little ginger paste across the top of the mix in the dish, and a generous sprinkling of sultanas before adding the cake mix.

There’s a lot of room for experimentation in the mix depending on how solid you like your sponge.

Served with cream because I had some to use up. Though I think home made custard would have hit the spot.

R