Peach Betty
Mix together 1 pint of soft, stale crumbs, a pinch of salt, 1/2 cupful of sugar and 1/3 of a teaspoonful of mixed ground spice; add a scant ½ cupful of melted butter, turning through well that the butter may be evenly distributed. Fill a pudding dish with alternate layers of this mixture and finely cut peaches and bake in a moderate oven for from thirty to forty minutes. Serve with either cream or a hard sauce.
A brown betty built on buttered crumbs rather than a flour crumble. The recipe as printed has one figure that cannot be right, so read the butter line carefully before you start.
- The butter is a misprintThe butter figure cannot be right -- a scant 1½ cupfuls of melted butter to 1 pint of crumbs would be soup, and the instruction to distribute it "evenly" implies a coating, not a bath. Most likely a misprint for a much smaller measure; add butter a spoonful at a time until the crumbs are glossy and still loose.
- A pint of crumbsDry measure here is by volume, not weight: 2 cups of soft crumbs, torn or grated from stale bread rather than dried and ground. Roughly 3 to 4 slices of plain white sandwich bread, crusts removed.
- "Soft, stale" mattersDay-old bread that is dry but still pliable absorbs peach juice without dissolving. Fresh bread turns to paste and packaged dry breadcrumbs stay gritty.
- Moderate oven350F. Thirty to forty minutes is right for a dish about 1½ quarts; the top layer should be crisp and the fruit bubbling at the edges.
- Mixed ground spiceAn old blend along the lines of what a British cook calls mixed spice: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, a little clove and ginger. Substituting equal cinnamon and nutmeg with a pinch of clove is close enough.
- PeachesRoughly 4 to 5 medium peaches, peeled and cut small. Fully ripe fruit needs no extra liquid; underripe or canned-and-drained fruit benefits from a spoonful of its juice or water sprinkled between layers.
- LayeringBegin and end with crumbs. The bottom layer keeps the fruit from sticking and the top is the only part that browns.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and a little vanilla or spirit, chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding. Cream, poured cold, is the plainer option.
- YieldSix modest servings from a 1½-quart dish. Best warm; it weeps if held long.
The betty is an American thrift pudding, generally traced to the 1860s, when "brown betty" is first cited in print, and usually made with apples, which is why "brown betty" became the default name. Its logic is the logic of a household that could not throw out bread: stale crumbs stand in for the pastry or batter that a cobbler or pie would demand, and the butter does the work that flour and shortening would otherwise do. The origin of the name is not established, though it is often said to be simply a familiar woman's name of the kind attached to many nineteenth-century puddings. A peach version belongs to late summer, when fruit was cheap or coming off a home tree: the whole dish is bread, sugar, spice, a little butter, and whatever fruit was in surplus.