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Brown Betty
3 cups chopped apples 2 cups bread crumbs 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg Juice and rind 1/2 lemon 1/4 cup water 2 tablespoons butter Mix the sugar with the spices. Arrange one-half of the crumbs in the bottom of the pan. Place one-half the apples, one-half the sugar and one-half the lemon juice, also one-half the melted butter, over them, then one-fourth of the bread crumbs and the remainder of the apples, the sugar, the lemon and the melted butter. Over all this pour the water. If apples are very juicy, omit all or part of the water. Cover with the remaining fourth of the bread crumbs. Put in a moderate oven, cover, and bake until the apples begin to get tender; then remove the cover.
A layered apple pudding that depends entirely on the crumbs staying distinct from the fruit. The original assumes a covered baking dish and dry, stale bread.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Covered, allow roughly 30-35 minutes, until the apples yield to a knife, then uncover for another 15-20 minutes so the top crumbs brown and crisp.
- The crumbs must be dryThe crumbs -- Dry crumbs work best here: torn stale bread dried in the oven rather than soft fresh crumbs or fine packaged breadcrumbs. Fresh crumbs soak up the juice quickly and the layers tend to lose their definition. The recipe itself says only "bread crumbs."
- Butter every layer of crumbsTwo tablespoons is modest for 2 cups of crumbs. Toss the crumbs with the melted butter before layering rather than pouring it over, so each layer is coated; unbuttered crumbs go soggy.
- ApplesChop rather than slice, as written, and choose a firm cooking apple that holds shape and has some acid — Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Modern dessert apples such as Red Delicious go to sauce.
- The waterTake the note seriously and omit it with juicy apples. A tart, firm apple in autumn may need the full quarter cup; a soft supermarket apple in spring needs none.
- RindZest the lemon finely with a rasp grater before juicing, and add the zest to the sugar and spices so it distributes. Strips of peel left in are unpleasant to eat.
- Layer proportionsThe instructions divide the crumbs into quarters but ask for one-half at the bottom — that is bottom half, one quarter in the middle, one quarter on top. It works out.
- Dish and yieldA 1 1/2-quart baking dish or 8-inch square pan, covered with a lid or foil. Serves four to six, warm, with cream or hard sauce.
Brown Betty is a named American dessert of the crumb-and-fruit family, appearing in print by 1864 and thoroughly domestic by the time this book was written; the origin of the name has never been documented, and the various stories about a particular Betty are traditional rather than evidenced. Its logic is thrift: stale bread, windfall apples, a little sugar and butter, and no pastry to make. That is also why it sits comfortably in a meatless cookery book — the wave of vegetarian and "meatless day" cookbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew heavily on existing frugal household cooking, and fruit desserts built on bread rather than suet or lard needed no adaptation at all.