Brown Betty
Prepare the same as Scalloped Apple, adding one half teaspoon cloves, one half teaspoon allspice, one half cup molasses, and one cup raisins seeded and chopped. Bake in slow oven one hour. 8 slices of bread ½ cup butter 6 apples
A variation entry that assumes you have the Scalloped Apple recipe in front of you: buttered bread layered with sliced apples and sugar, baked slowly until the fruit collapses. The additions here turn it into the spiced, molasses-dark version.
- The base you are being sent toScalloped Apple in this period generally means alternating layers of buttered bread (sliced or crumbed) and sliced apples in a deep dish, each apple layer sugared, finishing with bread on top. The 8 slices of bread, ½ cup butter and 6 apples printed here are presumably the base quantities, carried over to this variation.
- Slow ovenRoughly 250-325F; around 300F is a reasonable reading. The hour at low heat is what melts the apples down and keeps the molasses from scorching; a hotter oven browns the top long before the fruit softens.
- Sugar is not specifiedSugar is not specified in this entry -- any sugar presumably belongs to the Scalloped Apple directions, applied to the apple layers. With ½ cup molasses and a cup of raisins already going in, ½ to ¾ cup of sugar total should be ample for six tart apples.
- LiquidNo water is called for, and none is needed if the apples are juicy. Very firm storage apples benefit from two or three tablespoons of water or cider in the bottom of the dish so the lower bread does not dry out.
- Seeded raisinsMuch of the raisin supply of the period still carried seeds that had to be split and picked over, hence "seeded and chopped." Modern seedless raisins need only a rough chop, or none at all.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate the apples.
- The breadDay-old plain white bread, crusts on or off as you like, buttered on one side. Fresh soft sandwich bread turns to paste; dry it briefly in the oven first if that is all you have.
- CoveringThe recipe says nothing about it, but covering the dish for the first 40 minutes and uncovering for the last 20 will let the top slices crisp without the surface drying out over a full hour.
- YieldSix to eight servings in a dish of about 2 quarts. Serve warm with cream, or with hard sauce, a common accompaniment to such puddings.
Brown Betty is one of the plainest of the American bread-and-fruit puddings, a way of using stale bread and the tail end of the apple barrel, and the name is generally traced to New England periodicals of the mid-nineteenth century rather than to any identifiable cook. The "scalloped" construction it borrows here — alternating layers of buttered bread and fruit under a slow oven — was standard household practice long before it acquired the nickname, and the spiced, molasses-and-raisin version appears in Lowney's as a variation rather than a recipe in its own right. That this appears at all in a book published by a chocolate manufacturer says something about the genre: confectionery firms issued full general cookbooks as advertising, and the everyday desserts had to be there to make the volume worth keeping on the shelf.