Home › Puddings and Desserts › Brown Betty
Brown Betty
3 medium-sized apples 1 cup stale bread crumbs 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup boiling water 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon Juice and rind of 1/2 lemon Pare, quarter, core and slice the apples. Melt the butter and pour it with the lemon juice over the crumbs. Mix the cinnamon, grated lemon rind and sugar together. Butter a baking dish; put in alternate layers of apple and bread crumbs, sprinkling the apples with the sugar mixture, and making the last layer of crumbs. Pour the water on before adding the last layer of crumbs; cover and bake for thirty minutes or until the apples are soft; then uncover and brown the crumbs. Serve with cream or with soft custard or lemon sauce.
A short recipe that assumes a cook who already knows what a baked apple pudding should look like. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the dish size, and what "stale bread crumbs" meant.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, as was common in older American cookbooks. Bake at 350-375F; the covered stage steams the apples, the uncovered stage crisps the top.
- Crumbs"Stale bread crumbs" here means day-old bread torn or rubbed into coarse crumbs, not the fine dry sand sold in canisters. Packaged crumbs absorb the butter and water and turn pasty; tear up a stale white loaf instead.
- Measures1/4 cup butter is 4 tablespoons, half a stick; the cup is read here as the standard American 8 fl oz cup.
- ApplesThree medium apples is roughly a pound whole, nearer 3/4 lb once pared and cored. A firm tart variety holds its slices; softer dessert apples collapse into sauce, which is not fatal but changes the dish.
- Dish and yieldA 1-quart baking dish suits this quantity, filled in three or four alternating layers. It serves four modestly, and doubles into a 2-quart dish, which will need longer covered.
- The waterAdding the 1/4 cup water before the final crumb layer, rather than over it, is the point of that instruction. Poured on top it soaks the crust and nothing browns.
- BrowningAllow 10 to 15 minutes uncovered at the end, and butter the top crumbs lightly if they look dry. Thirty minutes covered is enough for sliced apples but not for wedges left thick.
- ServingSoft custard means a stirred pour-over custard, not a set baked one. Plain cream, lightly sweetened, is the simplest of the three options given.
Brown Betty is an American baked pudding of layered fruit and buttered crumbs; the name is generally traced to American print in the 1860s, though its origin is unrecorded and the "Betty" is generally treated as a nickname rather than a person. It belongs to the same thrifty family as the English apple charlotte and bread pudding, all of which exist to use bread that has gone dry, and it reflects a period when a household bought or baked whole loaves and expected to find work for the last of them. The lemon rind and cinnamon here are typical of American seasoning for apples, and the three-way choice of cream, soft custard or lemon sauce shows how a plain family pudding could be dressed up for company without changing the pudding itself.