Broth
The French appear to make some distinction between a soup and a potage, but I have never been able to define it. In England it is assumed that there must be some distinction between soup and broth, but again I have never been able to make out what is meant. This is the worst of culinary terms. They might be used with precision; but for one cook who treats his business as a science, there are a myriad who know nothing and turn everything into confusion. Although the usage in England is not certain, the tendency is to restrict the name of broth to the juice of meats more or less highly wrought before they take special form as soup. Broth, in short, is to soup what cloth is to dress.
BROWN BETTY is the English cousin of the Continental Charlotte. Like Charlotte, she has a taste for bread and 1 Browning butter and bakes it with fruit, chiefly apples. How Charlotte makes the combination may be seen under her name. The English receipt for Brown Betty is as follows :- Pare and slice a number of apples, and prepare a quantity of breadcrumbs. Put a layer of breadcrumbs in a pie-dish; then a layer of apples; then over the apples brown sugar and pieces of butter. Put on more layers of crumbs, apples, sugar and butter, until the dish is full. Pour over all a small teacupful of water, and then cover the whole with thin slices of bread and butter, forming a good solid roof for the pie. Bake it slowly, sprinkle it with sugar, and serve it either with or without cream. The apples will not be the worse for having a clove or two among them. Brown Betty admits of many variations. One is known in this country as Swiss pudding-pounded rusks, soaked in milk, being used for the breadcrumbs. Cover it with pounded rusks, and pour melted butter over it.
The entry opens with a digression on the words soup, potage and broth, then slides without warning into a working recipe for Brown Betty. The pudding is the part you can cook, and it needs a few translations.
- The hinge: butter every layerThe only fat in the dish comes from the dotted butter and the bread-and-butter roof. Skimp on it and the crumb layers stay dry and floury rather than turning to soft, caramelised paste. Reckon on 3 to 4 oz of butter for a dish holding 2 lb of apples.
- "Bake it slowly"The book gives no temperature; a slow oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 275-325F. At that heat a filled pie-dish takes about an hour to an hour and a quarter, until the apples give no resistance to a skewer and the juices bubble at the edge. The bread roof will brown before the fruit is done; cover it loosely once it has coloured.
- A small teacupful of waterA Victorian teacup is around 6 fl oz, and "small" suggests less. Use 4 fl oz at most, and less again with very juicy apples, or the bottom crumb layer turns to soup.
- ApplesUse a variety that collapses when cooked: Bramley, or a mix of Granny Smith and something sweeter. Dessert apples that hold their shape leave the layers loose and the pudding will not slice.
- BreadcrumbsDry, coarse crumbs from a day-old loaf, not fine fresh crumbs, which pack down into a dense paste. Some cooks toast them lightly in butter first, which is closer to what the slow bake is doing anyway.
- Rusks for the Swiss variation"Pounded rusks" means hard twice-baked biscuit crushed to a coarse meal. Plain unsweetened rusks or dry zwieback are the nearest thing on a modern shelf; crushed digestive or graham crackers will work but bring their own sugar, so cut back the brown sugar between the layers.
- Pie-dish and yieldA pie-dish here is a shallow oval or round baking dish, not a pastry case. An 8- or 9-inch dish of about 2 pints capacity, filled as directed, serves six.
- ServingWarm rather than hot, with pouring cream. The sprinkling of sugar over the top is done as it comes from the oven, so it sets on the buttered bread rather than dissolving.
Kettner's calls Brown Betty "the English cousin of the Continental Charlotte," which is a confident piece of misattribution: the name is generally traced to American print of the 1860s. What is true is the family resemblance the book identifies. Charlotte, apple charlotte, bread pudding and Brown Betty all descend from the same thrifty idea of layering or lining a dish with buttered bread or crumbs so that stale loaf becomes the structure of a pudding. Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written by the journalist E. S. Dallas for the London restaurateur Auguste Kettner, is arranged as an alphabetical dictionary, which is why a complaint about the imprecision of culinary language and a recipe for apple pudding end up sharing a page under B. The grumble about cooks who "know nothing and turn everything into confusion" is the book's characteristic note, and the loose distinction it settles on "broth is to soup what cloth is to dress" is still about as good as anyone manages.