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Brown Betty
Put a layer of sweetened apple sauce in a buttered dish, add a few lumps butter, then a layer of cracker crumbs sprinkled with a little cinnamon, then layer of sauce, etc., making the last layer of crumbs; bake in oven, and eat hot with cold, sweetened cream.- Mrs. T. J. Buxton, Minneapolis.
A layered apple pudding of the plainest sort: sauce, butter, crumbs, repeat. The whole thing hinges on the crumbs staying dry enough to crisp, so keep the layers thin and finish with crumbs on top.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the top layer is browned and the sauce bubbles at the edges. If the surface colors too fast, cover loosely for the first half.
- Cracker crumbs, not breadcrumbsIn this period cracker crumbs would generally have meant plain soda or water crackers, closer to a modern saltine or common cracker than to graham. Coarsely crushed saltines work; if you use graham crackers the pudding turns noticeably sweeter.
- QuantitiesMrs. Buxton gives none. For a buttered 8-inch square or 1 1/2-quart dish, figure about 3 cups sweetened apple sauce, 2 cups cracker crumbs, and 3 to 4 tablespoons butter dotted between the layers. Serves four to six.
- "A few lumps butter"A lump was not a fixed measure; treat it as somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Dot rather than spread, so the butter melts down into the crumbs and fries them lightly instead of soaking them flat.
- Apple sauceThe recipe specifies only sweetened apple sauce, and it works best thick. Commercial sauce is thinner and already sweet, so drain off any standing liquid and cut back on added sugar or the crumbs will go to paste.
- CinnamonOnly the crumb layers are spiced, which keeps the apple flavor clean. About 1/2 teaspoon total, divided among the layers, is in keeping with "a little."
- The cold sweetened creamThis is the sauce, not an optional garnish: heavy cream stirred with a spoonful of sugar and poured cold over the hot pudding. Do not whip it. The temperature contrast is the point of the dish.
Brown Betty appears in American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the name is generally traced to no particular Betty; the "brown" is often said to refer to the baked crumb top, though the explanation is folk etymology rather than documented. It belongs to a whole family of thrift puddings built on stale bread or cracker crumbs layered with fruit, cousin to the English apple charlotte and to the crisps and cobblers. This 1877 version starts from apple sauce rather than sliced raw apples, which makes it a way to use up a jar of sauce as much as a way to use up crumbs. That double economy is characteristic of Buckeye Cookery, a book assembled from the contributions of Midwestern housewives who signed their names to dishes intended to waste nothing.