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Dessert

Brown Betty

A baked apple bread pudding made with bread crumbs, apples, molasses, and optional raisins, almonds, or walnuts, served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Brown Betty

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a buttered pudding dish, layer soft bread crumbs and sliced sour apples alternately.

  3. Season each layer with bits of butter, a little coarse sea salt, and ground cinnamon.

  4. Add raisins, chopped almonds, or walnuts with the apples if desired.

Bake and serve

  1. Once the dish is full, pour ½ cup of molasses and ½ cup of hot water over it.

  2. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes, or until the apples are soft.

  3. Serve warm with cream.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Soft bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the pudding and soak up the molasses liquid as it bakes.
Sliced sour apples
Provide moisture and tartness, and soften into the soft layers of the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top and crumbs brown in the oven.
Molasses
Adds deep sweetness and color, and moistens the bread crumbs as it bakes.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, apple, butter, cinnamon, molasses, almond, walnut):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Pearfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, apple, butter, cinnamon, molasses, almond, walnut. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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Apple Pudding 8Pudding 6Apple 3Banana 3 See all 78 →

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