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Brown Betty
Into a buttered dish put a layer of sliced apples.
Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, and cover with soft bread crumbs. Continue this process until the dish is filled, having bread crumbs as top layer. Dot all over with small pieces of butter. Add a few spoonfuls of hot water. Bake in moderate oven until apples are tender. Serve hot with vanilla sauce or cream. 3 eggs
A no-measurement recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century books, which assumed the cook knew roughly what a pudding dish held. A few notes make it repeatable.
- The stray "3 eggs"The line has nothing to do with this pudding — there are no eggs anywhere in the method, and nothing to bind them. It is almost certainly type left over from a neighbouring recipe. Ignore it.
- Moderate oven350F. At that heat a dish about 8 inches square needs 40 to 50 minutes, until the apples give completely under a knife tip and the top is deep gold.
- Quantities to work fromFor a 2-quart dish: about 6 medium apples (2 lb), peeled and sliced thin; 2 to 2½ cups soft crumbs; ¾ cup sugar; 1 teaspoon cinnamon; 4 tablespoons butter. Serves six.
- Soft bread crumbs, not dry onesThe period term means crumbs torn or rubbed from the inside of a day-old loaf — coarse, still slightly moist. Packaged dry crumbs pack down into a paste and will not give the loose, buttery top the dish depends on.
- Slice the apples thinThe pudding has no thickener and no long cooking time, so the apples must be cut thin enough to collapse. A firm-tart variety — Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy — holds its flavour where a soft eating apple turns to sauce.
- The few spoonfuls of hot waterTwo or three tablespoons, no more. It is there to start the apples steaming before the butter melts through; too much and the lower crumbs turn to sludge.
- Cover, then uncoverNot in the original, but useful: foil for the first 30 minutes keeps the top from browning before the fruit is tender, then bake open to crisp it.
- Vanilla sauceA vanilla sauce of this period is usually a thin milk sauce thickened with cornstarch or flour and flavoured with vanilla, served warm, though custard and butter-sugar versions also went by the name. Cream, poured cold over the hot pudding, is the simpler option the recipe also allows.
Brown Betty's earliest known appearance in American print dates to the 1860s, and it became a standing fixture of household cookery for the reason all such dishes did: it used up stale bread. Before commercial breadcrumbs and before the sliced loaf, a kitchen would often have the dry end of a homemade loaf to account for, and layering it with cheap autumn apples turned two leftovers into a pudding. The origin of the name is not documented — explanations offered over the years are guesswork — but "brown" plainly describes the sugared, buttered crust. Its place in a Canadian flour-company book like Five Roses is telling: the company's cookbooks were promotional, distributed to sell flour, yet they carried a great many recipes such as this one that use no flour at all.