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Apple Dumplings
5 apples 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt 3/4 cupful milk Sugar Cinnamon Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together. Work in Crisco with finger tips; add gradually milk, mixing with knife to a nice dough. Roll 1/2 inch thick, cut into squares and lay in center of each an apple, pared and cored. Fill up centers with sugar and cinnamon and take corners off the dough and pinch together. Place in Criscoed baking pan, dot over with sugar and Crisco and bake in moderate oven for twenty-five minutes or till nicely browned. Serve hot with milk.
Sufficient for five dumplings.
A biscuit-dough dumpling wrapped around a whole apple, from one of the Crisco-sponsored cookbooks of the 1910s. The method is sound; the timing and the apple choice are what need attention.
- The timing is the weak pointTwenty-five minutes in a moderate oven browns the dough but will leave a whole pared apple crunchy at the core. Expect 40 to 50 minutes at 350F, and test by sliding a skewer through the dough into the fruit — it should meet no resistance. If the pastry colours before the apple is done, tent loosely with foil.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F; 350F is the safer reading for a long bake. If your dumplings are sitting in a shallow pan and browning unevenly, 375F for the first fifteen minutes and 350F thereafter gives a crisper base.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, hence the brand name recurring throughout the recipe. Any solid vegetable shortening works, as does lard; butter gives better flavour but a slightly less tender crumb. Four tablespoons to two cups of flour is a lean ratio, so work quickly and do not overhandle the dough.
- "Criscoed baking pan"Simply a greased pan. Use a dish deep enough to catch the syrup the apples throw off — a 9-inch square pan or a pie plate suits five dumplings.
- Choose a firm appleA Bramley will collapse into sauce and burst the dough. Braeburn, Granny Smith, Honeycrisp or Golden Delicious hold their shape through the longer bake this really needs.
- SealingTrimming the corners, as directed, lets the four flaps meet without a thick knot on top. Pinch the seams firmly; sugar syrup will find any gap.
- Sugar in the coreNo quantity is given. Roughly a tablespoon of sugar and a good pinch of cinnamon per apple fills the cavity; a small piece of butter added with it is traditional and improves the sauce.
- Serving"Serve hot with milk" means milk poured over, presumably at the table; the recipe does not say whether warm or cold. Cream, custard or hard sauce are all reasonable substitutes. The yield is given as five dumplings.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook published by a food manufacturer, its recipes written so that a single branded product appears in nearly all of them. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the company promoted it hard through recipe booklets aimed at housekeepers who had cooked with lard and butter all their lives — which is why the fat is named four times in a recipe of eight lines. The dumpling itself is much older and much plainer than the marketing around it: an apple baked inside a wrapper of dough, a dish long recorded in English and American home cookery, where it turned a few apples and a cup of flour into a hot pudding for a whole table. The use of baking powder rather than pastry or suet crust is often taken as a sign of a later, more American style of home baking, though such doughs were never exclusively American.