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Brown Betty
Butter Cinnamon Mrs. Bert Steir.
Crumble bread over bottom of buttered pan over crumbs place a layer of sliced apples. Sprinkle with brown sugar and cinnamon. Dot with butter. Repeat, having a layer of crumbs on top. Bake in an open pan 30 minutes.
Mrs. Charles Greenwood.
BLITZ CAKE (Two Layer) 1/2 C butter 1/2 C granulated sugar 14 C flour 2 t baking powder 3 egg yolks 14 C sweet milk 4 egg whites 12 C sugar Cream butter, ½ C granulated sugar together; add egg yolks well beaten. Add milk, flour and baking powder. Beat 4 egg whites until stiff, and add other ½ C sugar. Spread beaten white-of-eggs mixture on top of layers of cake and then bake. ½ C sugar 1 t vanillla 1 C milk Custard for Blitz Cake 1 egg yolk 24 T cornstarch Boil until thick. When cool spread between layers only. White of egg makes frosting for top.
Mrs. Ed. Quinten.
A church-supper Brown Betty of the plainest sort: bread, apples, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, layered and baked. The proportions are left to the cook, which was normal in a community cookbook where everyone already knew the dish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits it. Thirty minutes will soften thin slices of apple; thicker slices or a deep pan need 40 to 50 minutes, until the fruit yields to a knife and the top crumbs are brown.
- "An open pan"This means uncovered, not a particular dish. A buttered 8-inch square pan or a shallow 1 1/2-quart baking dish is right. Covering it steams the top layer and you lose the crisp crust that gives the pudding its point.
- What the crumbs should beTorn or coarsely crumbled day-old bread, not fine dry crumbs from a canister. Fine crumbs pack down and turn pasty. About 3 cups of loose crumbs from 4 or 5 slices suits a pan this size.
- Quantities to work fromFor an 8-inch pan: roughly 4 cups sliced apples, 3 cups crumbs, 1/2 to 2/3 cup brown sugar, 1 to 2 teaspoons cinnamon, and 3 to 4 tablespoons butter dotted over the layers. Nothing here is critical.
- ApplesUse a firm tart apple that holds its shape and does not need much sugar to be interesting. Slice thin and even, about 1/4 inch, or the top will brown before the fruit cooks through.
- Butter the top generouslyThe crumbs on top have no fruit juice reaching them, so they brown only if they are properly fatted. Dot the final layer more heavily than the ones beneath it.
- Yield and servingServes six. Serve warm rather than hot, with cream, a spoonful of whipped cream, or a hard sauce, which is how a pudding like this would have gone to table.
Brown Betty is one of the oldest American names in the layered-fruit-and-crumb family, appearing in print by the second half of the nineteenth century and never really leaving; the origin of the name itself is unrecorded, though it is generally taken to describe the browned crumb top. Its virtue in a congregational cookbook like this one is thrift: it uses bread that has gone stale, apples from the cellar in whatever condition they are in, and no eggs, no gelatine, no chocolate, nothing that had to be bought specially. Recipes of this kind are often said to have circulated by name rather than by measurement, which may be why the contributor felt no need to say how much bread or how many apples. The same pattern of fruit under a sweetened, buttered topping appears in the crisp and the crumble, both of which substitute flour and oats for the bread that defines a Betty.