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Brown Betty Pudding
Peel, core, and chop finely six or more cooking apples, and put a layer of them at the bottom of a buttered pudding dish. Sprinkle them with sugar, cinnamon, and little bits of butter; cover with bread-crumbs, and then another layer of apples, and so on until the dish is full. Sprinkle the top layer of bread-crumbs with bits of butter. Cover closely and bake for forty minutes. Serve hot with cream and sugar.
A layered apple crumb pudding that needs almost no translation, though the original leaves out oven temperature, dish size and how the crumbs should be treated.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; a moderate oven, around 350F/180C, suits it. Forty minutes covered at that heat will soften the apples through; uncover for the last ten minutes if you want the top layer to crisp and colour.
- Dish and yieldSix large cooking apples will roughly fill a 2-quart baking dish and serve about six, though the recipe says "six or more" and simply to fill the dish. Butter it generously, since the sugar and apple juice will caramelise at the sides.
- The crumbs are the hingeUse dry, coarse crumbs from stale bread, not soft fresh ones. Soft crumbs dissolve into the apple juice and the layers collapse into applesauce; dry crumbs stay distinct and absorb the syrup. Tossing them in melted butter first improves both texture and flavour.
- Cooking applesThe recipe means a tart apple that softens well when cooked: Bramley in Britain, or elsewhere a variety that breaks down, such as McIntosh, alone or mixed with a firmer tart apple like Granny Smith. A firm eating apple will stay in stubborn cubes and the layers will not settle.
- Sugar and spice quantitiesNone are given, which is normal for the period. Figure roughly a third to a half cup of sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon in total for six apples, adjusted to how sour the fruit is, plus about three tablespoons of butter dotted between the layers.
- "Cover closely"Foil or a lid, so the apples steam rather than dry out. Kitchen foil did not exist when this was written; a plate or an inverted tin would do the same job.
- Serving"Cream and sugar" at the table most likely means plain pouring cream rather than whipped. The recipe says to serve it hot, though the fruit juice is scalding straight from the oven.
Brown Betty appears in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, the earliest known printed references generally traced to the 1860s, and its inclusion in an English work like Cassell's reflects how freely recipes crossed the Atlantic in the late Victorian period. The origin of the name is not documented; "Betty" was a generic name for a plain servant or working woman, and the "brown" plainly refers to the crumbs, but any more specific story about a particular Betty should be treated as folklore. The dish belongs to a large family of thrift puddings built on stale bread, alongside charlottes, brown bread puddings and bread-and-butter pudding, all of which existed because bread went hard within a day or two and no household threw it away. Compared with an apple charlotte, which lines the mould with buttered bread and turns out, Brown Betty is deliberately unceremonious: layered in the dish it is baked in, and served from it.