CEiMB - Apple Brown Betty
Hostess of the Week: Jessica of Learning to Love Vegetables
I've never had apple brown betty. Never. I've heard of it, lusted after it, but never tasted it. Until today. While baking, it filled my home with the delicious aroma of apples and cinnamon. I figured even if it tasted bad, the smell was worth the effort of making it, right?
I've always wondered about the name. Don't you think Apple Brown Betty is strange? Why not Apple Brown Lulu for example. So I googled. This is what I found. A bit of history for you.
Betty or Brown Betty - A Betty consist of a fruit, most commonly apples, baked between layers of buttered crumbs. Betties are an English pudding dessert closely related to the French apple charlotte. Betty was a popular baked pudding made during colonial times in America.
According to The Oxford Companion To Food, by Alan Davison:
The name seems to have first appeared in print in 1864, when an article in the Yale Literary Magazine listed it (in quotation marks, implying that it was not then a fully established term) with tea, coffee, and pies as things to be given up during 'training'. That author gave brown in lower case and Betty in upper case: and, in default of evidence to the contrary, it seems best to go along with the view that Betty is here a proper name.
Simple to make. Easy to eat. Healthy and delicious thanks to Ellie Krieger's recipe. I substituted white bread for the whole wheat because that was what I had on hand and I used apple butter instead of apple cider.
You can check out Jessica's link above and find the recipe there or go to Craving Ellie's website and see what our other bakers did with their bettys.
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