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Pastry and Puddings (Cut out as for biscuit)
cut out as for biscuit, and drop into the boiling water. Boil ten minutes. Do not let them remain after they are done, or they will fall, on taking them from the water. Have apple-sauce or other fruit previously prepared, and spread it on the dumplings in your plate and pour sweetened cream over it. T Apple Corer.
This page begins mid-recipe: the dough itself was described in the lines above, which the cut-off has taken with them. What survives is the boiling and serving method for plain water dumplings, and it works with any standard biscuit dough.
- The missing half"Cut out as for biscuit" points back to a rolled biscuit dough of the period, though the page as it survives gives none of the ingredients or measurements. Rolled thin and cut small, rounds will cook through in the ten minutes given; thicker cuts may not.
- The hinge: lift them the moment they are doneThe instruction not to let them sit in the water is the whole point of the recipe. A leavened dumpling holds its rise on steam; left in the pot it soaks, loses its lift and collapses when drained. Have a slotted spoon and a warm plate ready before the dough goes in.
- The waterUse a wide pan with several inches of water at a steady, not violent, boil, and cook in batches so the dumplings are not crowded. A rolling boil knocks the edges off and clouds the water with flour.
- Ten minutesThe time the recipe gives, presumably for small biscuit-sized rounds. Test one by splitting it; the centre should be dry and open, not gluey. Larger cuts will need longer, but the same rule about lifting them out promptly applies.
- Sweetened creamPouring cream stirred with sugar, served liquid — not whipped. Single or light cream is closest; heavy cream is richer than intended and sits rather than soaks.
- Apple-sauce or other fruitMeant to be made ahead and used warm or at room temperature, spread over the dumplings on the plate rather than cooked with them. Stewed damsons, plums or rhubarb all suit.
- The stray line"T Apple Corer" at the end is a caption or index fragment from the printed page, not part of the method. Cookbooks of the period often carried small tool engravings set into the text column.
Boiled dough dumplings served with fruit and cream sit at the plain end of the American pudding tradition — no suet, no cloth, no long steaming, just biscuit dough dropped into water and eaten hot. They belong to the same family as the dumplings cooked on top of stewed chicken or apples, and they made sense in a kitchen where the oven was slow to heat but a kettle was always on. Household cookbooks like this one grouped such things under "Pastry and Puddings." The reliance on apple-sauce "previously prepared" is a clue to the period as well: sauce was put up by the crock or the jar in autumn and drawn on all winter, so the dumpling was the part you made fresh.