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Apricot Dumplings
2 cups flour. ½ teaspoon salt. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1 tablespoon Cottolene. 1 cup thick cream.
PROCESS: Mix and sift flour, salt and baking powder, rub in Cottolene with tips of fingers, add cream, cutting it into flour mixture with a knife. Mix well. Turn on a floured board, knead slightly and roll out to one-half inch thickness. Shape with a large biscuitcutter and place two halves of peeled apricots (drained from the syrup in the can) on each circle. Enclose them, pressing edges of dough together. Place them in a well-buttered granite dripping pan, one and one-half inches apart; sprinkle round them one cup granulated sugar, pour around two and one-half cups cold water. Bake in a hot oven twenty minutes, basting three times during cooking. Serve with 1/2 cup butter.
A baking-powder biscuit dough wrapped around canned apricot halves and baked in a shallow sugar syrup, which becomes the sauce. Two things decide whether it works: keeping the dough cold and sealing the seams properly, or the syrup gets in and the dumplings collapse.
- CottoleneA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening (blended with beef suet), and the reason this book exists — it was published to sell the stuff. Substitute an equal amount of vegetable shortening, lard or cold butter, rubbed in until the mixture looks like coarse meal.
- Thick creamHeavy cream, 36% or above. It supplies the remaining fat, so do not substitute half-and-half or milk without adding more shortening; the dough will be dry and tough.
- Hot ovenRoughly 425–450°F. Twenty minutes may not be enough for a half-inch dough sealed around cold fruit, so start checking at the time given and be prepared to go longer. The dough should be browned on top and dry when a skewer is pushed through the seam.
- Granite dripping panSpeckled grey enamelware — a shallow roasting pan. Any metal or ceramic baking dish of similar shape works; you want the dumplings sitting in liquid no more than halfway up their sides.
- BastingYou are spooning the sugar-and-water syrup from the pan over the dumplings, which glazes the tops. Do it quickly and shut the oven; three times over the bake is right.
- Sealing the fruitDrain the apricot halves well and blot them. Wet fruit prevents the dough edges from bonding, and a dumpling that opens in the pan turns to paste. Press the seams firmly and set them seam-side down.
- "Serve with 1/2 cup butter"Ambiguous as written. It may point to a hard sauce — butter creamed with powdered sugar — but plain melted butter poured over with the pan syrup is an equally defensible reading.
- YieldPerhaps eight dumplings from a large cutter, serving four to eight depending on appetite. Best warm; the biscuit dough goes leaden once fully cold.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller and issued by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a cleaner and more economical alternative to lard — which is why the brand name appears in the ingredient list rather than the word "shortening." The choice of canned apricots is itself a period detail: by the 1910s California canneries had made stone fruit an ordinary winter pantry item, and cookbooks of the decade lean on canned fruit heavily for out-of-season desserts. Baked dumplings of this kind, biscuit dough folded around fruit and cooked in a sweetened liquid, belong to the same Anglo-American family as apple dumplings and cobbler; they are distinct from the Central European Marillenknödel, an apricot dumpling made with potato dough and poached, which the name may otherwise bring to mind.