Thursdays are for cooking….

It’s getting around that time of year when the heat goes on and you’re out in the sticks looking for a 12-point buck. It would be nice to come home to a fully-loaded table, especially with my favorite dessert from grade school. No, the lunch ladies did not add rum to the betty, but we’d get it at least once a week.

Rum Raisin Apple Brown Betty

This recipe comes from  https://civilwartalk.com/threads/rum-raisin-apple-brown-betty.150524/ .  It gets a little creative and replaces the traditional molasses with some spiced rum. You’ll still enjoy that deep sugary flavor, but with a little taste of rum to “spice” it up. This is a great dessert for this time of year.

Ingredients:
2 oz spiced rum
1/2 cup raisins
3 large Granny Smith apples
juice of one lemon
4 Tbsp salted butter plus more for pan (1/2 stick of butter)
3 cups stale breadcrumbs (You can buy these packaged at the grocery.)
2/3 cup brown sugar (dark brown sugar has more molasses)
cinnamon
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350F.
Combine spiced rum and raisins and set aside to soak. To speed up absorption by the raisins, you can also cook them on very low heat until they puff up to fatness.
Peel and core apples and then slice them very thinly, and place apple slices in lemon juice and toss to cover.
Slice butter into paper thin slices.
Butter the bottom and sides of your baking dish. (Don’t use the sliced butter.)
Cover the bottom of the pan with 1/3 of the breadcrumbs.
Top breadcrumbs with half the apples and raisins and a third of the brown sugar and sliced butter, and sprinkle lightly with cinnamon.
Add another layer of breadcrumbs and repeat the above two steps. Top with the remaining breadcrumbs, brown sugar, butter and another sprinkle of  cinnamon. If you like spiced rum, drizzle some more over the pudding before baking.

Bake for 50-60 minutes or until apples are tender and the top is a golden brown.  Serve warm with ice cream (cinnamon and vanilla are both good with this.)

Two more recipes for the betty, which is an old English word for a baked pudding, plus a rum raisin sauce are found here:

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/587377/Apple-Brown-Betty-a-delight-dating-back-to-colonial-times.html

This and other Colonial-era dishes were ways for thrifty or poor housewives to stretch the contents of the pantry and use up imperfect things like partially spoiled apples. Apples were easier and cheaper to get in North America than in England, very plentiful back then just as they are now, and kept well when stored in barrels with straw. Any variety will do for the betty, but some varieties like Granny Smiths and Greenings are best for baking.

There is also Louisa May Alcott’s favorite dessert, apple slump, also known as apple grunt.  https://paperandsalt.org/2012/02/01/louisa-may-alcott-apple-slump/

The term ‘grunt’ apparently comes from the sound the apples make when they are cooking.

And then, because the word ‘pudding’ has a distant British origin, you might be interested in a dessert called Spotted Dick. It’s a steamed pudding cooked in a specific pudding cylinder form, loaded with raisins (which they call currants) and served with a custard, which is a cream sauce made with egg yolks, ½ & ½, vanilla, sugar and cornstarch, which they call corn flour. And the use of ‘dick’ may come from pudding originally pronounced “puddick”.  And quitcher giggling!

Spotted Dick recipe: https://britishfoodhistory.com/2014/01/23/spotted-dick/

Custard sauce recipe:  https://britishfoodhistory.com/2012/03/02/proper-custard/

This dish goes way back in time, is simple and easy to prepare and uses suet instead of butter. You can probably substitute butter for suet if you prefer it, but do include the custard sauce with it, along with a good hot beverage.

The point to this is that in Them There Olden Days, they knew what worked and what didn’t and how to make the most of a small budget, and they knew what was good for you, at lot better than the hysterical warnings that hammer us now.

Maybe it’s time we all return to more simple, basic things, like good food and the company of real friends and occasionally take a break from the hue and cry and howling of the PC social justice howler monkeys.

They don’t know what really matters in life. They may never learn.

Be damned to them!

Category: Economy