I was hoping to try to cook the Northumberland Threshing Day Barley Bread recipe for the letter N but I couldn't find any barley flour in the shops. I've found a source of it on-line but the delivery cost makes it quite expensive so I've put that recipe to one side and I'll try it when I manage to track down some affordable flour.

Instead I've decided to try a Nottingham Pudding, which is a batter pudding with spiced baked apple inside. The traditional method appears to be to cook the apple whole in the batter. I thought about slicing the apple and frying it first, which might make it easier to eat, but I decided to stick to the original recipe.

Of course there's usually no such thing as a single original recipe so I looked at a few sources, including modern websites and Cassell's Dictionary of Cooking, which I have consulted for many of these recipes. Most recipes seem to resemble the two versions from Cassell's so I decided to follow the first one, which includes butter.

I made a general purpose pancake batter using equal volumes of egg, flour and milk, along with a pinch of salt. I peeled and cored an apple, mixed together butter, sugar, cinnamon and mixed spice and put it in the middle of the apples. The apple was studded with a few cloves then placed in a buttered dish, the batter was poured around and the whole lot was baked for about 45 minutes at gas mark 6.

I didn't really expect much from this but it came out well and I think it was nicer than I was expecting. This might have been partly because I was quite hungry when I tried it, fresh out of the oven.