Brown Betty
1/4 cup melted butter 1 pint bread-crums from center of loaf 1 pint sliced apples 1/2 cup fruit-juice or water 1/2 cup sugar or molasses Juice and grated rind of lemon or orange Arrange alternate layers of buttered bread-crums and thinly sliced apples in a pudding-dish, sprinkle with sugar and a little cinnamon or other spices. Finish with crums and pour mixed molasses and water or fruit-juice over all. Cover and bake for one-half hour, remove the cover and bake three-fourths of an hour more. Stewed peaches, apricots or rhubarb make a good substitute for the apples in this pudding.
A wartime-thrifty pudding built on stale bread and windfall apples. The original gives no oven temperature, and the crumb is not what a modern cook usually means by breadcrumbs.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. Bake at 350F, covered for the first half hour and uncovered for the remaining three-quarters. Total time is a little over an hour, which is right for raw sliced apples in a deep dish.
- What "bread-crums" means hereSoft crumb torn from the inside of a day-old loaf, in pieces roughly pea-to-thumbnail size, not the fine dry crumbs sold in canisters. Packaged dry crumbs will absorb the liquid immediately and set into a paste.
- A pint is two cupsBoth the crumbs and the apples are measured by volume, loosely packed. Two cups of sliced apple is about two medium apples, roughly 7 to 9 oz once peeled and cored.
- Butter the crumbs, not the dishToss the torn crumb with the melted butter in a bowl before layering. Drizzling butter over assembled layers leaves half the bread dry and the rest greasy.
- Sugar or molassesHalf a cup of molasses gives a dark, almost gingerbread flavor and noticeably more liquid; granulated or brown sugar keeps the apple flavor forward. If using sugar rather than molasses, dissolve it in the fruit juice or water before pouring.
- Slice thinly and firmlyThe apples soften largely in the liquid and steam held under the cover, so cut them no thicker than 1/8 inch. A firm cooking apple such as Braeburn or Granny Smith holds its shape; softer eating apples collapse to sauce.
- The fruit substitutionsStewed peaches, apricots or rhubarb are already soft and wet, so use less added liquid and check at the 45-minute mark. Rhubarb in particular will need the full half cup of sugar or more.
- YieldFills a 1 1/2-quart baking dish and serves four to six. Best warm, with cream or a plain custard sauce.
Brown Betty is an early named American pudding still in circulation, appearing in print by the 1860s and thoroughly domestic in its logic: stale bread, whatever fruit was cheap, and molasses standing in for sugar. Where an English apple charlotte lines a mold with buttered bread and turns out, the Betty simply layers crumb and fruit in the dish it is served from. Its appearance in the New Delineator Recipes, compiled from the pages of the Butterick magazine The Delineator, reflects the economical bent of that publication's food columns in the 1920s. The list of alternates at the end -- peaches, apricots, rhubarb -- shows the dish being treated as a formula rather than a fixed recipe.