Peach Betty
Mix well together three cupfuls of fine bread crumbs, one-half of a cupful of granulated sugar, one heaping teaspoonful of cinnamon and a pinch of salt. Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter and stir it into the crumbs. Grease a deep pudding dish and in it place alternate layers of the prepared crumbs and peaches, cutting each piece of the fruit into quarters and having the first and last layers crumbs. Pour over all one-half cupful of water and bake it forty minutes in a moderate oven. Serve with hard sauce. Canned peaches may be used.
A Brown Betty in all but name, with the crumb mixture doing the work of both crust and thickener. The original assumes you know how much fruit to use and what hard sauce is; both need filling in.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. Forty minutes at that heat is right for a deep dish of roughly two quarts; the top layer of crumbs should be dry and browned and the fruit juices bubbling at the edges.
- How much fruitNo quantity is given. Three cups of crumbs wants about 2 lb of peaches — six to eight medium fresh ones, peeled and quartered, or two 15-oz cans of halves, drained and quartered.
- The crumbs"Fine bread crumbs" most likely means crumbs rubbed from stale, close-grained white bread rather than the sandy dried crumbs sold for breading, though the recipe does not specify. Coarse fresh crumbs from a modern loaf work; pulse day-old bread and let it dry an hour or so.
- Butter is scantTwo tablespoons for three cups of crumbs is little by modern standards. Four to six tablespoons gives a top that crisps rather than merely toasts, and is closer to how the dish is made now.
- The waterThe half cup of water is there to steam fresh peaches soft. With canned fruit, which is already cooked and carries its own syrup, cut it to two or three tablespoons or the bottom layer turns to paste.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, about 1/2 cup butter to 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or a little of the peach syrup, then chilled firm. It is served cold in a spoonful on the hot pudding so it melts down into it.
- YieldServes six to eight. Best warm, within an hour of coming out; the crumb top softens as it stands.
The Betty is one of the oldest surviving American fruit puddings, a family of dishes — betty, grunt, slump, crisp, cobbler — built on the same thrifty principle of layering fruit with stale bread or batter and baking it. The name appears in print in America by the middle of the nineteenth century, though no origin for it is documented; apple Betty was the standard version, and peach Betty is the summer variant, appearing in books like this one alongside the note that canned peaches will do, a small marker of how far commercial canning had reached the ordinary household kitchen. Hard sauce, despite the name, is simply butter and sugar beaten cold — the English called much the same thing brandy butter — and it was a common accompaniment to baked and steamed puddings on American tables of the period.