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Brown Betty
2 tablespoons melted butter 4 sliced or chopped apples 2 cups toasted bread Grating from lemon or Juice of one orange or add enough water to make cup liquid crumbs orange rind cup sugar Put the buttered crumbs into a baking dish in alternate layers with the apples, making the last layer of crumbs, and sprinkle each layer of apples with the fruit juice, water and sugar. Bake one hour; cover the dish the first half of cooking. cup cooked apple
A simple baked apple pudding of buttered crumbs and fruit, written in the telegraphic style of a two-column household book. The proportions are workable once you fix the crumb-to-apple ratio and pick an oven temperature, which the original never states.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, with the dish covered for the first thirty minutes, will cook the apples through and let the top layer of crumbs dry and colour.
- Toasted bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs made from stale bread toasted in the oven, not soft fresh crumbs and not the fine sandy commercial kind. Coarse crumbs from a firm white loaf hold their shape between the apple layers; fine dry crumbs collapse into paste.
- Buttering the crumbsToss the 2 tablespoons of melted butter through all the crumbs before layering, so every crumb is coated. This is what keeps the interior layers from turning to wet bread and gives the top its crispness.
- Missing quantitiesSeveral measures have lost their fractions in the original setting: the sugar, the liquid and the cooked apple are all printed as bare "cup". A half cup of sugar and a half cup of liquid suit four apples; adjust the sugar to how tart the fruit is.
- The liquidOrange juice made up to the required volume with water, plus the grated rind of a lemon or orange. Use unwaxed fruit and grate only the coloured zest, since the white pith is bitter.
- ApplesA firm cooking apple that holds some shape is better than a soft eating variety, which will slump. Slice thinly and evenly so the layers cook at the same rate in the hour given.
- CoveringCover for the first half hour so the apples steam in their own juice, then uncover to let the surface dry. Skipping the cover leaves undercooked fruit under a browned lid of crumbs.
- YieldFour apples and two cups of crumbs fill a dish of roughly 1 to 1.5 quarts and serve four to six. Serve warm, with cream or a hard sauce.
Brown Betty is an American baked pudding of layered fruit and buttered crumbs, recorded in print by the middle of the nineteenth century; the origin of the name is unknown and the various explanations offered for it are traditional rather than documented. It belongs to the same frugal family as the cobbler, the grunt and the pandowdy, all ways of turning a quantity of apples and some stale bread or leftover dough into a hot sweet dish without pastry-making. Its appearance in a cookbook like this one reflects how thoroughly the dish had settled into ordinary domestic cooking by the early twentieth century: cheap, forgiving of imprecise measurement, and made from what was already in the kitchen.