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Steamed Fruit Dumplings
Prepare a quart or more of boiling apple sauce, cranberry sauce, strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, or huckleberry sauce. It should be well sweetened and a hint of nutmeg and a tablespoonful of Snowdrift should be added. Place on this gently boiling sauce, dumplings about three inches in diameter, cut from Baking Powder Biscuit dough. Let cook gently for twelve minutes, then serve with or without a Hard Sauce.
A pan of sweetened fruit sauce doing the work of a steamer: the dumplings cook in the fruit steam rather than in liquid. The original assumes you know to keep the pot covered, which is the whole trick.
- Cover the pan and leave it aloneBiscuit dough set on simmering sauce cooks by trapped steam. Put on a tight lid at once and do not lift it during the twelve minutes, or the tops stay pale and doughy while the bottoms stew.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening. Any solid vegetable shortening works; a tablespoon of butter in the sauce is a better-tasting substitute.
- QuantitiesA quart of sauce is 4 cups, and you want it deep enough that the dumplings sit on it without sinking to the pan bottom. A wide pan gives room for the dough to swell.
- The doughStandard baking powder biscuit dough, cut in 3-inch rounds as the recipe specifies. How many rounds a quart of sauce will hold in a single layer depends on the pan -- roughly six to eight, serving four to six.
- Frozen or canned fruitBerry sauces made from frozen fruit may be looser than a sauce cooked down on the stove. If it seems thin, thicken with a teaspoon or two of cornstarch slurry before adding the dumplings.
- Keep it at a bare simmer"Gently boiling" means the surface just trembling. A hard boil splashes sauce over the dough and scorches sugar on the pan bottom.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavouring, chilled firm, and set on the hot dumpling to melt. The book expects the reader to know it; there is nothing hard about it but the chilling.
This is a promotional cookbook: Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening, and its recipe pamphlets existed to show the new industrial fat could stand in for lard and butter in everything, down to a tablespoon stirred into fruit sauce. The dish itself is older than the book, and is usually described as a relative of the English boiled and suet puddings, adapted in American kitchens to biscuit dough cooked over stewed fruit rather than in a cloth. Slump and grunt are New England names for much the same idea (a cobbler is baked rather than steamed), and the list of fruits here runs from apple and cranberry to huckleberry and the summer berries.