Home › Menus for Small Children › Apple Betty (2 1/2 cups)
Apple Betty (2 1/2 cups)
2 cups stale bread crumbs 4 tablespoons shortening 3 large cooking apples 1/2 cup sugar 1 cup water cinnamon Place bread crumbs and sliced apples alternately in buttered baking dish. Sprinkle with the sugar and cinnamon, dot the shortening over top. Pour the water over all. Bake till apples are soft.
A plain crumb-and-apple pudding of the sort meant to use up dry bread. The recipe gives no oven setting and no time, so those are the two things to fix before you start.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350F. A hotter oven browns the crumb top before the apples collapse, which is the fault this dish is prone to.
- TimingFigure 40 to 50 minutes covered, then 10 minutes uncovered to dry and brown the surface. The apples should be soft enough to cut with a spoon.
- ShorteningIn a book of this period shortening means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat. Butter works and tastes better here; 4 tablespoons is half a stick.
- Bread crumbsStale means dry and coarse, torn or grated from day-old bread, not the fine dust sold in canisters. Fine commercial crumbs turn pasty under a cup of water.
- ApplesThree large cooking apples is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, peeled, cored and sliced thin. Use a variety that breaks down -- Bramley, McIntosh, Cortland -- rather than a firm eating apple.
- The waterA full cup is generous and will steam the crumbs soft. If you want any crispness on top, hold back a quarter cup and add the shortening dots only after the first 20 minutes.
- CinnamonNo quantity is given; a half to one teaspoon suits this amount. Sprinkle it with the sugar rather than over the apples alone so it distributes.
- Dish and yieldThe title's 2 1/2 cups most likely records the yield rather than the dish size: four child-sized portions or two adult ones. Choose a dish that holds the crumbs, apples and water comfortably.
Brown Betty appears in American print by the mid-nineteenth century and was a standard way to turn stale bread and cheap autumn apples into a hot pudding without pastry or a pie tin. The small yield and the soft, mildly sweet, thoroughly cooked result fit the early-twentieth-century view of nursery food -- the same reasoning that put milk toast and coddled apples on children's trays. The origin of the name is not documented.