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Deep Pudding-Pans
3. Twelve ounces of mashed potatoes, one ounce of suet, one ounce of red herring, chopped fine or bruised in a mortar. Mix and bake. 4. Twelve ounces of mashed potatoes, one ounce of suet, and one ounce of hung beef, grated or chopped fine. Mix and bake.
XIII. Brown Betty.
ONE cup of bread-crumbs, two cups of chopped tart apples, half a cupful of sugar, one teaspoonful of cinnamon, and two teaspoonfuls of butter cut into small pieces. Butter a deep dish, and put a layer of the chopped apples at the bottom; sprinkle with sugar, a few bits of butter and cinnamon; cover with bread-crumbs, then more apple. Proceed in this order until the dish is full, having a layer of crumbs at the top. Cover closely, and steam three-quarters of an hour in a moderate oven; then uncover and brown quickly. Eat warm with sugar and cream or sweet sauce Serve in the dish in which it is baked.
XIV. Some Good Puddings.
Three recipes run together here: two thrifty baked potato puddings and a Brown Betty. The potato numbers are savoury, despite sitting in the pudding chapter, and are best read as supper dishes rather than desserts.
- Ounces are weight, not volumeTwelve ounces of mashed potato is about 340 g, something like a cup and a half of stiff mash. The single ounce each of suet and fish or beef is 28 g, a seasoning quantity rather than a filling.
- Red herringNot a figure of speech but the article itself: a whole herring heavily salted and cold-smoked until hard and mahogany-coloured. Modern kippers and smoked herring fillets are far milder and wetter; use a quarter of the salt-cured kind you might find at a Caribbean or Eastern European grocer, and taste before adding any further salt.
- Hung beefSalted beef air-dried until it grated like cheese, comparable to bresaola or American dried chipped beef. Dried beef from a jar, or bresaola chopped very fine, is the nearest thing on a supermarket shelf.
- SuetShredded beef suet, sold packaged in Britain and available frozen or from a butcher elsewhere. Cold grated butter behaves differently but will do; it melts sooner and gives a softer set.
- Baking the potato puddingsNo time or temperature is given. A greased dish at 375F for 30-40 minutes gives a browned top and a hot centre; the mixture is already cooked, so the bake is only about heating through and crusting.
- "A moderate oven" for the Betty350F. The dish is covered so the fruit steams in its own juice for 45 minutes; the final uncovered browning wants 425-450F for 8-10 minutes, or the grill for a shorter burst.
- CrumbsDry crumbs work better here than soft fresh ones, though the recipe specifies only 'bread-crumbs'. Fresh crumbs collapse into the apple juice and the layered structure disappears. Stale bread grated or pulsed and left to dry out gives a crisp top.
- ApplesTart and firm: Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Chopped, not sliced, as written. One cup of crumbs to two of apple fills roughly a 1-quart dish and serves four.
- Cover closelyModern dishes rarely come with tight lids; foil crimped over the rim does the same job. Without it the fruit dries rather than steams and the pudding will be leathery on top and raw underneath.
The two potato puddings belong to a long line of economy cookery aimed at stretching a little animal protein across a lot of starch, the kind of dish that circulated in charity cookbooks and household manuals through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the numbering suggests they were lifted from a longer numbered list of such formulas. Brown Betty is a different creature, a plain American baked pudding of layered fruit and crumbs whose name is often said to first appear in American print in the mid-nineteenth century, with no convincing explanation of who Betty was. What makes it worth attention is the method: covering the dish so the apples steam before the top is browned produces a moister fruit layer than the open-baked apple crisps that later displaced it.