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Brown Betty
Place alternate layers of chopped juicy apples and stale bread-crumbs in buttered baking-dish, having crumbs on bottom. Add cinnamon and sugar to each layer of apple, using more sugar if apples are very tart. The top layer to be breadcrumbs with more butter. Bake for an hour, covering dish at first. Brown crumbs on top. Serve warm with hard or liquid sauce, or, if preferred, sugar and cream. Scant sugar in pudding if sweet sauce is used.
A straightforward layered apple pudding that needs only a few numbers the original leaves out.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits the hour stated for a 1 1/2- to 2-quart dish.
- Cover, then uncoverThe instruction to cover at first is the hinge. The lid or foil traps steam so the apples actually cook down; remove it for the last 15 to 20 minutes so the top crumbs crisp and brown rather than staying damp.
- The crumbsStale bread torn or grated into coarse crumbs, not fine dry packaged crumbs, which turn to paste. Enriched sandwich bread works; a firm white or challah is better. Toss each layer with melted butter rather than dotting it, so no patch stays dry.
- Apples"Juicy" is doing real work here, since there is no added liquid at all. Use a variety that breaks down and releases moisture, and slice or chop thin so it collapses within the hour. Very firm storage apples may need a spoonful or two of water or cider.
- QuantitiesNone are given. About 6 cups sliced apples, 3 cups crumbs, 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 4 tablespoons butter fills a 2-quart dish and serves six.
- Hard sauceA hard sauce is butter creamed with powdered sugar and flavouring, served cold in a lump so it melts over the hot pudding. "Liquid sauce" means a thin cooked sauce, usually sugar, butter, water and a little cornstarch or spirit. Keeping the pudding itself scantly sweetened, as the last line says, is sound advice with either.
The name Brown Betty is attested in American print in the 1860s, though its regular cookbook life comes later, and the origin of the name has never been documented — it is generally traced to nothing more than alliteration and the browned top. What is clear is why it belongs among the uses for left-over bread: before commercial breadcrumbs, a household's stale loaf was a standing resource, and puddings like this, along with charlottes and bread puddings, existed to absorb it. The dish is the crumb cousin of a crisp or crumble, using bread where later recipes use oats and flour, and it is often said to have survived into twentieth-century school and institutional cookery precisely because it is cheap, forgiving of quantities and made from whatever apples are on hand.