This week’s Martha Mondays is Apple Brown Betty, chosen by April at AbbySweets. I make apple crisp every fall, but have never tried Brown Betty – and didn’t even know what the difference is until I made this recipe. The difference has to do with the starch component. When I make apple crisp, I make a topping of flour, sugar, butter and cinnamon. Apple Brown Betty relies on bread crumbs.

I made fresh breadcrumbs as Martha directs. You mix your apples with cinnamon, sugar,  and nutmeg and lemon juice and then some of the breadcrumbs (which have been tossed with butter).  Dump it into your pan and cover with the remaining breadcrumbs. This gets baked covered in foil for 40 minutes, then you uncover it until the apples are soft.

It looked and smelled good. There’s nothing like the smell of apples and cinnamon to make it feel like fall. We liked it, but we like apple crisp better.  The texture of the breadcrumbs is hard to get used to when you’re used to the softness of apple crisp. This also isn’t quite as sweet as my apple crisp recipe.  Somehow apple crisp is mushier – you can’t see slices of apple, but in this they stayed fairly intact. It was good, and would definitely be better with some vanilla ice cream, but I won’t make it again.

Here’s my recipe for apple crisp which I would make instead of this:

Peel, core and slice 6 apples. Toss them with 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp salt and 1/2 cup of water. Put in a square baking dish (sprayed with Pam). Mix and crumble together 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 tsp cinnamon and 4 tbsp butter. Spread over the top of the apples. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for an hour.