Apple and Oat Betty

For Christmas dinner this year we made roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. It turned out really well, despite my inability to work the meat thermometer and the mild panic that ensued. We were trying to come up with a good dessert to go with it and so I looked through my mom's cookbooks and found this tiny one with Yorkshire recipes in it.

My mom's family is from Yorkshire. My great-grandfather (I believe) used to take a boat on the canals there. The story goes that on the way back in the evening he would stop at every pub along the way and apparently there were a lot of pubs because the horse would have to guide him home.

Actually, my sister-in-law made an awesome pecan pie for dessert. That happened at Thanksgiving too. Apparently we don't think we need to have more than one dessert, at least as long as one of those is pecan pie who is going to eat anything else.

But we'd got all the ingredients for this recipe so I made it the next day. It was written with weights for everything. My mom has a scale which I used but I also measured in case you don't have one. I actually like using a scale in cooking.

It calls for two big apples and I thought that wouldn't be enough, but my mom got two really really big apples so they were fine.  Make sure you get good baking apples, which have a good balance of tartness and sweetness and which will hold their shape when cooked and not get mushy.  I like granny smith.  Jonagolds, honeycrisp and braeburns are all good too.  Mix a couple of different types for even more flavor.

I really liked the addition of marmalade.  I find orange marmalade on it's own a little too sweet, but mixed with a bit of lemon juice on the apples, I could almost just eat the filling.

I love this dish of my mother's so I'm including a picture.  It is just so my mom.

I've probably talked about crumbles before as being super easy.  They really are!  The most time consuming task here was peeling the apples.  We ended up bringing the betty with us to our friends the next night.  We had dumplings (potstickers) which is a delicious tradition and ate this.

This seemed a little small for dessert for 10 people so we got some vanilla bean ice cream to put on it.  It was totally delicious.

Apple and Oat Betty

3 oz. (3/4 cup) flour
3 oz. (1 cup) rolled outs
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp mixed spice (I used 1/4 tsp allspice and 1/4 tsp cloves)
4 oz. (1 stick) butter
3 oz. (6 tbsp) sugar
2 large cooking apples, peeled, cored and sliced
Rind and juice of one lemon
2 tbsps orange marmalade
1. Put the flour, oats and spices into a large bowl. Add 3 oz. (3/4 stick) of butter, cut into pieces, and rub into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
2. Stir in the sugar.
3. Toss the prepared apples in the lmon juice, rind and marmalade.
4. Grease a 1 1/2 - 2 pint ovenproof dish.
5. Put half the apples in the dish and sprinkle half the oat mixture over them. Top this with the remaining apples and the rest of the oat mixture. Dot the top with the remaining 1 oz. (2 tbsps)_butter.
6. Cook in a 375F degree oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour until the apples are tender and the topping crispy. Serve warm.

From "Favourite Yorkshire Recipes" by Amanda Persey

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