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Apple and Bread-Crumb Pudding
Mrs. S. McMaster.
Pare and chop fine half a dozen cooking apples, grease a pudding dish and put in a layer half an inch thick of grated bread, add bits of butter, put in a layer of chopped apples with sugar and nutmeg, and repeat till the dish is full; pour over the whole a teacup of cold water; bake thirty minutes, Requires no sauce.
A plain layered brown betty, written for cooks who knew their own stove. Two things are missing from the original: an oven temperature and a realistic time.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350-375F, covered for the first two-thirds if the top browns early.
- Baking timeThirty minutes may not be enough to soften a full dish of chopped apple. Allow up to 45-55 minutes if needed, and test with a knife tip at the centre rather than by the clock.
- A teacup of waterA teacup is smaller than a modern mug; period equivalences varied, but it is commonly read at around 6 fl oz. It is there to steam the apples, not to make a sauce, so do not increase it.
- Grated breadThis means fresh crumbs grated from a stale loaf, not dry commercial breadcrumbs. Dry crumbs pack down and turn pasty; tear day-old bread and pulse it coarsely instead.
- Butter"Bits of butter" is roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons per crumb layer, dotted so the crumbs crisp rather than sit wet. Figure 3-4 tablespoons in total.
- ApplesHalf a dozen cooking apples means firm, tart fruit that holds its shape: Granny Smith or Northern Spy suit this well, whereas Bramley cooks down to a purée. Sweet dessert apples collapse into sauce and the layers disappear.
- Sugar and nutmegQuantities are left to taste, as was normal. About 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar total across the layers, and nutmeg grated fresh; pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its point in a dish this simple.
- Yield and servingSix apples with their crumb layers will need something nearer a 2-quart dish, giving roughly 6 servings. The closing "requires no sauce" need not be read as a prohibition - cream is not out of place.
Layered puddings of buttered crumbs and fruit run through nineteenth-century American and British household books under a shifting set of names - apple charlotte, brown betty, apple pudding - and the family resemblance is stronger than any of the labels. Such dishes are often said to have owed their existence to the thrift that kept stale bread out of the bin: a stale loaf grated into crumbs became the structure of a dessert that needed no pastry, no eggs and no separate sauce, which is exactly the economy Mrs. McMaster's closing line is boasting about. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, first published 1874, with further editions later in the decade) was compiled from contributions by named local women and sold for charity, and recipes like this one show the format's limits as much as its charm: no oven temperature, no sugar measurement and no pan size, all of which the cook was presumably expected to supply herself.