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Peach Dumplings
2 cups flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1½ cups granulated sugar. 2 tablespoons Cottolene. 7/8 cup cream.
Peaches. 2½ cups cold water.
PROCESS: Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt; rub in Cottolene with tips of fingers, add cream gradually, cutting it in with Sepiember a knife. Turn on a floured board, knead slightly, pat and roll out to one-half inch thickness. Shape with a large biscuit cutter. Pare juicy, ripe peaches, cut in halves lengthwise, remove stones, cut in quarters and place three-quarters of a peach on each circle of dough, enclose them, pressing the edges together. Place in a buttered, granite dripping pan one and one-half inches apart, sift sugar around dumplings and pour cold water over sugar. Bake in a hot oven twenty minutes, basting three times. Serve with Hard or
A biscuit-dough dumpling baked in its own sugar syrup rather than boiled in a cloth. The sugar and water are not optional garnish — they are the sauce, and the basting is what glazes the tops.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil compounded with beef suet, heavily advertised in this era, and the reason it appears by name throughout this book. Substitute 2 tablespoons vegetable shortening or lard; butter works but browns faster.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400-425F; the book gives no temperatures. Twenty minutes suits a half-inch dough round enclosing three-quarters of a peach; if your dumplings are larger, give them 25-30 minutes and check that the dough is dry underneath.
- 7/8 cup creamThat is 1 cup less 2 tablespoons. Heavy cream gives the richest dough; the mixture should be soft but not sticky, so hold back a little and add as needed depending on your flour.
- Granite dripping panGranite ware meant speckled enamel over steel. A 9x13 metal or enamelled baking pan does the same job. Avoid glass, which is slow to bring the syrup to a boil.
- The syrupAll 1½ cups sugar goes into the pan around the dumplings, not into the dough, and the 2½ cups cold water goes over it. It boils down to a thin syrup during baking. Use a pan with sides at least 2 inches high or it will spill.
- Basting three timesSpoon the pan syrup over the tops roughly every five minutes. Skipping this leaves the dough pale and floury on top and the syrup thin.
- PeachesFreestone varieties are easiest to halve and stone. Three-quarters of a peach per round is a generous filling; the recipe calls for juicy, ripe fruit, though firmer fruit will hold its shape better.
- Yield and servingPerhaps eight dumplings from this quantity of dough, depending on cutter size. The text breaks off mid-sentence at "Hard or", presumably before a second sauce. Serve warm with the pan syrup.
Dumplings of this kind sit between two older traditions: the English boiled suet pudding tied in a cloth, and the American baked "pandowdy" or fruit roll cooked in sugar and water. By 1900 the boiling cloth is often said to have been in retreat, with chemically raised biscuit dough baked in syrup increasingly taking its place in domestic cookbooks, faster, cleaner, and suited to a coal or gas range with a reliable oven. The repeated appearance of Cottolene here is not incidental: 52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which manufactured it, and the book functioned as an extended advertisement for cottonseed shortening as a substitute for lard. Peaches in the September menu reflect the ordinary seasonal logic of the period, when a dumpling like this would have been made while the fruit was cheap and abundant.