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Brown Betty
Chop fine two cups of tart apples. Butter a bakingdish and place on it a layer of apple, sprinkling with cinnamon, sugar and butter. Place on this a layer of the crumbs, alternating with the apple till dish is three-fourths full, leaving bread-crumbs on top. Add no water but cover tight and steam three-quarters of an hour in moderate oven when remove cover and quickly brown. Serve with milk or sweet sauce.
A plain apple pudding that depends on trapped steam rather than added liquid. The original assumes soft bread crumbs and a dish with a tight lid; both matter more than the exact quantities.
- The missing measurementNo amount of crumbs is given. For two cups of chopped apple, plan on roughly two to two and a half cups of soft crumbs, torn from stale bread rather than bought dry — dry, sandy crumbs absorb the apple juice and turn pasty.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually reckoned around 350-375F. Once the cover comes off, raise the heat or slide the dish under the broiler for a few minutes, watching it closely.
- No water is not a mistakeThe apples supply all the liquid, which is why the dish must be covered tightly. If your baking dish has no lid, seal it with foil; a loose cover lets the steam escape and the top layer bakes to dust.
- Choice of appleTart is specified for a reason. A cooking apple such as Bramley breaks down to sauce while still tasting of fruit; a firmer acidic apple like Granny Smith keeps more of its shape. Sweet dessert apples give a flatter, cloying result and need less sugar.
- Chopped, not slicedChopping fine helps the fruit cook through in three-quarters of an hour without added liquid. Thick slices risk staying firm when the crumbs are done; thin ones will manage.
- Butter and sugar per layerThe recipe sprinkles rather than measures. About three tablespoons of butter in small bits and half a cup of sugar distributed across the layers suits two cups of apple; the top crumb layer should get the most butter, since it does the browning.
- Yield and servingEnough for about four in a dish of roughly a quart. A 'sweet sauce' of this sort could be a simple hard sauce or a thin vanilla pouring custard; cold cream does the same job.
Brown Betty appears in American sources from the later nineteenth century — the earliest known printed references date to the 1860s — and the name has never been satisfactorily explained; it is generally traced no further than an anonymous kitchen coinage, with "brown" for the crumb crust and "Betty" as a generic name for a plain household dish. Its logic is thrift: stale bread, windfall apples, sugar and a little butter, baked in one dish with no pastry to make and no crust to fail. That places it in the same family as the English apple charlotte and the various crumb puddings that preceded the modern streusel-topped crisp.