Brown Betty
¼ cup melted butter
½ cup fruit-juice or water
1 pint bread-crums from center of loaf
½ cup sugar or molasses
1 pint sliced apples
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. the apples in this pudding.
Stewed peaches, apricots or rhubarb make a good substitute for apples in this
A plain apple-and-breadcrumb pudding with no oven temperature and a bake time longer than most cooks would give it today. Two decisions carry the dish: the kind of crumb and how much liquid it has to absorb.
- Use soft crumbs, not dry"Crums from center of loaf" means soft, torn interior crumb from a white loaf, not the sandy dried crumbs sold in canisters. Dry commercial crumbs drink the liquid instantly and set into paste.
- Pint means volumeA pint here is two cups by measure, so roughly two cups of loosely packed crumbs and two cups of thinly sliced apples. The two are meant to be about equal in bulk.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; a pudding of this sort belongs in a moderate oven, 350F. The covered stretch steams the apples, the uncovered stretch dries and browns the top layer.
- The bake time is longAn hour and a quarter total will reduce sliced apples to sauce. Modern practice is 30 minutes covered at 350F, then 20 to 30 minutes uncovered, until the apples yield to a knife and the top is crisp. Judge by the fruit, not the clock.
- Sugar or molassesThey are not interchangeable in flavor. Half a cup of molasses gives a dark, faintly bitter pudding closer to Indian pudding; sugar keeps it light and lets the lemon read. If using molasses, hold the spices back a little.
- Butter the crumbs firstThe instruction is to layer "buttered" crumbs, meaning the quarter cup of melted butter is tossed through the crumbs before they go in the dish, not poured over the top. Unbuttered crumbs go soggy rather than crisp.
- Dish and yieldA 1 1/2-quart baking dish suits these quantities and serves four to six. Cover with a lid or foil for the first stage.
- The rhubarb substitutionStewed rhubarb stalks work well and need less added liquid, since they release their own. Rhubarb leaves are not edible and are never used.
Brown Betty is an American frugal pudding, recorded in print by the 1860s and generally traced to the practice of stretching a small amount of fruit with stale bread — the same logic behind English bread pudding and charlotte, but built in layers rather than a lined mold. The origin of the name is unknown; the various stories attached to it are folklore rather than documented history. Its appearance in a Butterick household book of the early twentieth century is telling: the publisher's audience was sewing and keeping house on a budget, and a dessert made from the middle of a loaf, a few apples and whatever fruit juice was left in a jar cost almost nothing. The alternates offered here — peaches, apricots, rhubarb — reflect a kitchen cooking from what was in season or already stewed and waiting in the pantry.