Home › Hot Puddings › Scalloped Apples
Scalloped Apples
1 small baker's stale loaf 1/4 cup butter 1 quart sliced apples 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg Grated rind and juice of 1/2 lemon Cut loaf in halves, remove soft part, and crumb by rubbing through a colander; melt butter and stir in lightly with fork; cover bottom of buttered pudding-dish with crumbs and spread over one-half the apples, sprinkle with one-half sugar, nutmeg, lemon juice, and rind mixed together; repeat cover with remaining crumbs, and bake forty minutes in moderate oven. Cover at first to prevent crumbs browning too rapidly. Serve with sugar and cream.
A brown betty in all but name, and it stands or falls on the crumbs: they must be dry, buttered, and left in loose flakes rather than packed down, or the whole dish turns to paste.
- The loafCut the stale loaf in half and take out the soft interior; that is what gets rubbed through the colander, and a small loaf should give somewhere in the region of 2 1/2 to 3 cups of coarse crumbs. Day-old white sandwich bread or a plain white boule works; skip anything sweet, seeded, or sourdough-tangy.
- Crumbing without a colanderRubbing dry bread through a colander gives irregular flakes rather than sand. A few pulses in a food processor does the same job, but stop while the crumbs are still uneven.
- Butter1/4 cup is 4 tablespoons. Melt it, pour over the crumbs, and toss with a fork just until they glisten. Overworking compacts them.
- A quart of sliced applesRoughly 1 1/4 lb, or three to four good-sized apples, peeled, cored and cut thin. A firm baking apple such as Braeburn or Golden Delicious holds its shape; softer varieties collapse into sauce over forty minutes.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F. Use a buttered pudding-dish; something in the 1 1/2- to 2-quart range suits the quantities.
- CoveringFoil or a lid for the first 25 minutes, then uncovered for the last 15 to crisp and colour the top. This is the instruction the recipe flags for good reason -- unprotected buttered crumbs brown long before the apples soften.
- LayeringCrumbs, half the apples, half the sugar-nutmeg-lemon mixture, then repeat, and finish with the remaining crumbs. Mix the sugar, nutmeg, lemon juice and rind together first so the juice does not pool in one spot.
- Yield and servingAbout six modest servings. "Sugar and cream" means the table passes a sugar bowl and a jug of plain, unwhipped cream.
Layered crumbs and fruit baked under butter is one of the oldest economies in the English and American kitchen -- a way of using bread past its best while stretching a small quantity of fruit. In the United States the form is usually called a brown betty, a name that appears in print by the 1860s though its origin is undocumented; "scalloped" here is being used in the sense of a dish baked in layers with crumbs, the same usage that gives us scalloped potatoes and scalloped oysters, though the word itself goes back to cooking in a scallop shell. Its place among the hot puddings is telling: American household cookbooks of this period commonly gave whole chapters to warm baked puddings, which were cheap and filled out a plain dinner. Nutmeg and lemon rind are a very common nineteenth-century seasoning pair for apples, in use well before cinnamon became the default.