Peel and core apples; sprinkle well with sugar. Then mix some cold boiled rice with 1 egg, a pinch of salt, sugar and cinnamon, flour enough to make a dough. Cover the apples with the dough; put in a well-buttered baking-dish with 2 tablespoonfuls of butter and bake to a delicate brown. Serve with whipped cream.
A rice-paste dumpling rather than a pastry one, and the recipe assumes you already have leftover boiled rice in the larder. The quantities are left almost entirely to the cook, so the notes below fill in the gaps.
- Working quantitiesFor six medium apples, figure on about 2 cups cold cooked short- or medium-grain rice, 1 egg, a good pinch of salt, 2-3 tablespoons sugar, half a teaspoon cinnamon, and flour added a spoonful at a time until the mass just holds together — roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup. More flour than that gives you a heavy crust.
- The hinge: cold rice, cold handsThe rice must be thoroughly cold and fairly dry, or the egg will loosen it and no amount of flour will make it wrap. Chilling the mixed dough before patting it around the fruit helps; a rice paste of this kind is easier to pat on in a sheet than to roll.
- OvenThe book gives none. Bake at 375F for 45-55 minutes, until the crust is a light brown and a skewer slips easily through the apple. A cooking apple that holds its shape — Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy — is what this wants.
- Filling the coresThe recipe cores the apples but never says to fill them. Sugar with a little cinnamon and a knob of butter in each cavity is a reasonable addition and keeps the centres from steaming hollow.
- The 2 tablespoons of butterThese go in the dish, not the dough. Dot them around the dumplings so they baste the bottoms; with rice paste there is no fat in the crust itself and the undersides will otherwise stick and dry.
- Whipped creamUnsweetened or barely sweetened is right here, since the apples, the dough and the cavities are all sugared. At the time this would have been cream whipped by hand and served cool against a hot dumpling.
- YieldOne dumpling per person; six apples serve six as a dessert. They are best within an hour of baking, as the rice crust firms and turns pasty once fully cold.
Rice as a dessert casing rather than a pudding on its own is a thrift move as much as a French one — binding cold boiled rice with an egg turns it into a pastry substitute that needs no butter and very little flour. Books of this era regularly gave apple dumplings in suet crust, short crust or biscuit dough, so a rice version reads as a variation on a thoroughly familiar dish rather than an import. National framing of this kind was the selling point of a whole genre of daily-dish calendars around the turn of the twentieth century, in which national labels were attached fairly loosely; a dish was French if it used rice and cinnamon in a way an American cook found continental, and the attribution should be read as marketing rather than provenance.