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Brown Betty
Arrange alternate layers of bread crumbs and thinly sliced apples in a pudding dish, sprinkle sugar, a little cinnamon or other spices and dot butter over each layer. Finish with crumbs and pour one cup of mixed molasses and water over all. Bake covered for one-half an hour, remove the cover and bake three-quarters of an hour more.
A plain layered apple pudding that depends almost entirely on how you cut the apples and what kind of crumbs you use. The original gives no oven temperature and no quantities beyond the cup of liquid, so a few decisions are yours.
- The hinge: slice the apples thinWith no added liquid but the one cup of molasses and water, the apples cook largely in their own moisture. Thin slices, about an eighth of an inch, will soften close to a sauce during the covered half hour; thick wedges may still be firm at the end.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits the stated timing. Total baking time is one hour and fifteen minutes: thirty minutes covered, forty-five uncovered.
- What "bread crumbs" meantSoft crumbs torn or grated from day-old white bread, not the dry sandy commercial kind, which turn to paste. Figure roughly three cups of soft crumbs for a two-quart dish, and toss them with the butter rather than dotting it if you want more even browning.
- The molasses and waterThe proportion is genuinely unspecified. Half and half gives a dark, distinctly molasses pudding; a quarter cup of molasses topped up with water is closer to modern taste and lets the apples read as apples.
- Sugar and spiceAlso unmeasured. About a half cup of sugar total across the layers is in keeping with the sweetness of the molasses; a teaspoon of cinnamon, or cinnamon with a scrape of nutmeg or clove, covers the "other spices."
- Dish and coveringA "pudding dish" here is any deep two-quart baking dish. Foil will stand in for whatever lid or plate was originally used; take it off promptly at the half hour so the top crumbs crisp rather than steam.
- Apple choiceUse a firm tart apple that holds some shape — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy. Softer dessert apples will go entirely to purée under this much time.
- Yield and servingAbout six modest servings. Serve warm with cream, or with a hard or foamy sauce.
Brown Betty is an American thrift pudding, a way of turning stale bread and windfall apples into a hot dessert without pastry, and it belongs to the same family as the crumbles, crisps and bread puddings that fill this section of the book. The name is generally traced to mid-nineteenth-century American print, where it appears without explanation, as if already familiar; who Betty was, if anyone, is not documented. The molasses here is the older touch ed ssugar was cheap and universal by the time this recipe was printed, but molasses had been the everyday sweetener of American kitchens for generations, and it survives in recipes like this one as much by habit as by taste. That the pudding is baked for an hour and a quarter probably says something about the coal or wood range it was written for: one imagines the oven was hot anyway, so long slow baking would have cost little extra.