Ozark Pudding (Mom's recipe)

Ozark Pudding was made popular by Bess Truman when Harry Truman was president. She took a common dessert and made it very famous, serving it to family, friends, even foreign visitors....all loved it!

The reason Ozark Pudding is so similar to French Huguenot Pudding is because they came from the same source. The families of Boucher, Sallee, Garrett, Mustain and many, many others came to northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, which at that time was considered the "west." Among the families into which these Huguenots married included the Trumans; Harry Truman grew up in southwest Missouri. This Ozark pudding that Bess Truman served many, many times, in the White House, was brought by these Huguenot ancestors all those years ago.

FMM: This is my version of the recipe that uses more walnuts and apples than the original recipe. It is wonderful.

2 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cup walnuts, roughly chopped (Mom's original recipe: 1 cup)
2 1/2 cup chopped apples (Mom's original recipe: 1 cup)

Beat eggs. Add sugar and beat until creamy. Stir in the rest of the ingredients. Bake in a 10" pie plate at 350 degrees for 35 minutes.

Serve warm decorated with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

History of Ozark Pudding

This Huguenot Torte or Ozark Pudding is Charleston, South Carolina’s most famous dessert. Almost all restaurants in the area serve this wonderfully delicious apple and nut torte. The recipe is neither Huguenot or a torte – it is kind of like a pecan pie without a crust and resembling a apple crisp. A southern confection that you can easily master at home with a few apples, pecans, flour and sugar.

Ozark Pudding was a favorite dessert of President Harry Truman, a recipe by his wife, Bess Truman, having been widely published in the 1950s, including it being her contribution to the Congressional Club Cookbook.

Huguenot Torte History:
It is generally thought that this modern dessert was adapted from the classic Ozark Pudding (which is more of a cake than a pudding) that originated in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri. The Ozark Pudding was a favorite of the Huguenot community of Charleston and was made in homes and taverns. According to culinary historian John Martin Taylor in an article in the Rock Hill Herald newspaper, by John Egerton (author of Southern Foods), published on August 30, 1988:

The torte descends from a more recent Midwestern dessert called Ozark pudding. Huguenot torte first showed up in print in 1950 in Charleston Receipts, a successful community cookbook in which the torte recipe was attributed to Evelyn Anderson Florance (then Mrs. Cornelius Huguenin).

In the 1980s, Taylor tracked her down in a nursing home and discovered that she had eaten Ozark pudding at a church dinner in Galveston, Texas, in the 1930s. Around 1942, after working with the recipe to get it the way she liked, she renamed it Huguenot torte after Huguenot Tavern, a Charleston restaurant where she made desserts. The tavern became known for this torte.

This pudding was given the name Huguenot Torte to reflect the Huguenot’s love of this dessert and their heritage. The name stuck in Charleston, and it continues to be called that to this day, even though the dessert is neither a torte nor is it of Huguenot origin.

History of Huguenots: Forty-five Huguenots, Protestant French immigrants, arrived in the new province of Carolina on April 30, 1680, from London. King Charles II had subsidized the voyage so that the Huguenot people might establish an British territory with the crops and industries that had long been French monopolies. The group included grape growers, wine makers, brick makers, weaver, businessmen, and at least one goldsmith. They also arrived with orders that the settlement be renamed “Charles Town.”