Brown Betty
Mix together 1 pint of finely crumbled stale bread, a pinch of salt, 3 to 4 tablespoonfuls of sugar, according to acidity of apples, ½ teaspoonful of cinnamon, a pinch of cloves. Melt and stir through this 2 large tablespoonfuls of butter. Pare, core and chop or cut fine 2 heaping cupfuls of tart apples in alternate layers in a buttered pudding dish, having crumbs on top.
If the apples are not juicy, add 2 or 3 tablespoonfuls of cold water. Cover and bake in a moderate oven until the apples are soft, then uncover and brown the top. Serve hot or cold with cream and sugar.
A three-ingredient dessert built on stale bread, and it succeeds or fails on the crumbs. The original text drops a phrase in the middle — the apples and the buttered crumbs go into the dish in alternate layers, ending with crumbs on top.
- A pint of crumbsDry measure by volume: 2 cups of crumbs, loosely packed. Tear stale white or egg bread and pulse it briefly, or grate it — you want irregular crumbs, not fine sand, so the top can crisp.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F. Expect roughly 35 to 45 minutes covered, until the apples give no resistance to a knife tip, then 10 to 15 minutes uncovered to brown the top; the recipe itself gives no times and asks you to judge by the softness of the fruit.
- Large tablespoonfuls'large' here means heaped rather than level. Read the 2 large spoonfuls of butter as about 3 tablespoons, or 1.5 oz, and the 2 or 3 tablespoons of water as 1/8 to a scant 1/4 cup.
- Tart apples matterThe sugar range of 3 to 4 tablespoons assumes a genuinely sour apple — Bramley, Granny Smith, a windfall cooker. With a sweet supermarket apple, stay at 3 tablespoons and add a squeeze of lemon.
- Cut fineTwo heaping cupfuls of chopped apple, roughly 2 to 3 medium apples. Chop rather than slice thickly: the pieces have to collapse in the same time the crumbs take to set, or you get raw fruit under a browned lid.
- Covering the dishA lid or foil traps the apple steam, which is what softens the fruit; apart from the 2 or 3 tablespoons of water the recipe allows for dry apples, the fruit supplies the moisture. Do not skip the covered stage in favour of a longer open bake.
- YieldAbout a quart of mixture; serves 4 modestly. Doubled, it will need a larger dish and somewhat longer covered baking.
Brown Betty appears in American print by the mid-nineteenth century and was firmly established as a household pudding by the time cheap-cookery collections like this one were compiled; who the Betty was has never been documented, and the various stories attached to the name are traditional rather than traced. Its logic is entirely economic, which is why it sits in a low-cost book: stale bread that would otherwise be wasted, apples at their cheapest, and spice and sugar in quantities small enough not to matter. It belongs to a whole family of thrift puddings — bread pudding, apple charlotte, crumb-topped cobblers — that treat yesterday's loaf as a structural ingredient rather than a leftover, and the instruction to judge the sugar "according to acidity of apples" is a reminder that cooks then bought whatever fruit was going, not a named variety.