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Pineapple Betty
1/2 of one medium. 1 cup stale cake. 1/4 cup stale cake crumbs 2 tablespoons butter cup sugar cup boiling water Cut the pineapple in 1 inch slices and peel. Boil sugar and water for five minutes. Add pineapple and cook until tender. Butter a bakingfive minutes. Add pineapple and cook until tender. Butter a bakingpan, cover with cake crumbs, then a layer of pineapple drained from the juice. Dot with butter and add another layer of crumbs and pineapple. 1/4 cup sugar. 3/4 cup boiling water.
Have crumbs for top layer. Pour pineapple juice over and bake about 45 minutes in a moderate oven. Serve with hard sauce.
A brown betty built on cake crumbs rather than bread, with fresh pineapple poached in syrup before layering. It is straightforward once the syrup and the crumbs are in hand.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is generally taken as 350-375F; 350F is the safe reading here. Forty-five minutes at that heat sets the layers and browns the top crumbs; cover loosely with foil if the top colours before the time is up.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe sugar and boiling water are both given as "cup" with no fraction, and no quantity of pineapple is stated. A half cup of each, with one medium pineapple, gives a syrup in the right proportion, but the original figures cannot be recovered from the text as printed.
- Fresh pineapple onlyCanned pineapple in juice will not behave the same way: it is already soft and will collapse. If you use it, skip the poaching and use the canning juice, reduced slightly, in place of the syrup.
- Cutting the fruitSlice in inch-thick rounds, peel, then core each round and cut into wedges or chunks. Whole inch slices are awkward to layer and awkward to serve.
- Cook until tenderRipe pineapple needs roughly 8 to 12 minutes in the simmering syrup. It should yield to a knife tip but still hold its shape, since it gets another 45 minutes in the oven.
- Stale cake crumbsPlain butter or pound cake, dried out and crumbled coarsely, not blitzed to powder. Fine crumbs turn pasty under the syrup. One cup covers about a 1 1/2 pint dish in three thin layers.
- Draining and the juiceDrain the fruit well before layering, then pour the reserved syrup over at the end as directed. Adding the wet fruit straight in floods the bottom crumb layer.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, flavoured with vanilla or a spirit, worked smooth and chilled firm. It is meant to melt over the hot pudding at the table.
- YieldNo yield is given. On this quantity of crumbs it will serve about four in a small baking dish; double everything for a 9-inch square pan.
Brown betty is an American baked pudding of alternating fruit and crumbs, with the name appearing in print by the 1860s and its origin unsettled, though nobody has pinned down who Betty was. The classic version uses apples and stale bread; the form was elastic enough that any fruit and any dry starch would do, which is exactly why it survived in company cookbooks aimed at thrifty households. Pineapple became a plausible substitute once canned and shipped fruit made it an everyday item in American kitchens rather than a luxury centrepiece. The use of cake crumbs rather than bread points to the same instinct: a betty was where the leftovers of the week were spent, and hard sauce, a cold butter-and-sugar paste older than the pudding itself, dressed the result up for the table.