Brown Betty
Put a layer of bread crumbs into a well-buttered baking-dish; on the crumbs small bits of butter; next a layer of apples, cored and sliced; with sugar and Larkin Nutmeg or Larkin Cinnamon. Repeat this until the dish is full. Add one-half cup of water; bake in a moderate oven. Serve with hard sauce.
A layered apple pudding with no fixed quantities, which is how nearly every Brown Betty was written. The proportions are forgiving; the two things worth getting right are the crumbs and the covering.
- Moderate oven350F. Figure 45 minutes to an hour in a 2-quart dish, until the apples give no resistance to a knife and the top layer is deep brown.
- Bread crumbsDry, coarse crumbs from a day-old loaf, not fine dried breadcrumbs from a canister, which turn to paste. Torn or grated stale bread holds its structure against the apple juice.
- Larkin Nutmeg, Larkin CinnamonHouse-brand spices from the Larkin Company of Buffalo, sold by mail order. Any nutmeg or cinnamon does the job; a teaspoon of cinnamon or half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg spread across the layers is about right.
- ApplesUse a firm cooking variety that holds shape and has some acid to it. About 2 lb, cored and sliced thin, fills a 2-quart dish in three layers.
- Sugar and butterThe recipe gives no amounts. Roughly 3/4 cup sugar total, scattered over the apple layers, and 3 to 4 tablespoons butter in small bits across the crumb layers.
- End with crumbsFinish the top with buttered crumbs rather than apple, or the fruit dries and leathers. If it browns before the apples are soft, lay foil over it.
- The half cup of waterJuicy fruit needs little or none, and too much water leaves the bottom layer sodden.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavouring, served cold in a lump on the hot pudding so it melts. Not a cooked sauce.
- YieldSix servings from a 2-quart dish.
Brown Betty turns up in American sources from the 1860s onward, with cookbook printings following later, and belongs to the same thrifty family as the pandowdy, the slump and the crisp: fruit stretched with whatever bread was going stale. The name has no settled origin, though it is generally traced to the colour of the browned crumb top rather than to any particular Betty. What dates this version is the branding. Larkin was a Buffalo soap manufacturer that built a mail-order empire on premiums, shipping spices, extracts and household goods to subscribers, and cookbooks like this one circulated as advertising in the guise of domestic advice. The recipe's vagueness about quantities is ordinary for the period, when a cook was expected to judge by the dish in front of her, but the two named spices are specified exactly, which tells you what the page was really for.