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Baked Fruit Dumplings
Roll out the mixture for Baking Powder Biscuits to onefourth inch in thickness. Cut in four-inch squares, and in the center of each place a tablespoonful of chopped, fresh apple, peaches, apricots, or sweetened berries, or of canned or stewed fruit, which has been sweetened. Fold up the edges, press them together and place, fold side down, in a baking-pan, which has been rubbed with Snowdrift. Bake in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F., for thirty minutes, and serve hot with Lemon, Nutmeg, or any of the Hard Sauces given in this book.
A straightforward biscuit-dough dumpling, and one of the rare early-twentieth-century recipes that gives an actual oven number. The only real difficulty is that it depends on two other pages of the book you do not have.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company; books of this kind were generally produced to promote the brand. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and butter is better for flavour in both the dough and the greased pan.
- The missing biscuit doughYou need roughly 2 cups flour, 3 to 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 to 1/3 cup shortening cut in, and about 2/3 cup milk — a standard biscuit ratio of the period. Mix it just until it holds together; overworked dough gives tough dumplings.
- Thickness mattersA quarter inch is thinner than you would roll biscuits, and deliberately so: the dough has to stretch over the fruit and still bake through in thirty minutes. Four-inch squares from a 2-cup batch give six to eight dumplings.
- SealingThe hinge of the recipe is the seam. Bring the four corners up over the fruit, pinch the edges firmly, and set them seam down so juice cannot open them. A wet fingertip along the edges helps; a flour-dusted, dry edge will not hold.
- Fruit quantityA tablespoonful per square sounds mean but is correct at this dough thickness. Chop hard fruit such as apple small, since thirty minutes at 350F will not soften large chunks, and drain canned fruit well or the parcels steam themselves apart.
- Moderate ovenThe book already says 350F, which is right. The dumplings are done when the dough is set and lightly browned on top and the bottoms have coloured.
- Hard sauceA hard sauce is creamed butter and sugar beaten with flavouring such as grated nutmeg or spirits, served cold in a spoonful on the hot dumpling so it melts. Roughly 1/2 cup butter to 1 cup sifted confectioners' sugar. The Lemon and Nutmeg sauces named here may be separate recipes in the book rather than hard sauces.
Fruit dumplings of this kind sit at the point where the old English boiled suet pudding, tied in a floured cloth, gave way to something quicker made with chemical leavening and baked in a pan. Baking powder reached American kitchens in commercial form in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the 1910s a biscuit dough was a common shortcut wrapper for apples, peaches and berries. The recipe appears in a Snowdrift book because such books generally existed to show that a cottonseed-oil shortening could stand in for butter or lard in household use; the Southern Cotton Oil Company was turning cottonseed, long a low-value by-product of ginning, into a national kitchen staple, and pamphlets full of biscuits, pastry and fried dishes were the argument. The stated oven temperature is itself a period marker: ranges with thermometers were spreading, and cookbooks were beginning to give numbers alongside the older "moderate."