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Baked Apple Dumplings
The dough is the same as for Roly-Poly, you roll out ¼ of an inch thick, cut out in squares and lay in a half or a whole apple (peeled or cored) in the centre and spread sugar and cinnamon over the top and a little piece of butter and pull the corners of the dough over the top covering the apple.
You can also use part of the apple, cutting it into pieces, but then you must pinch the dough together after folding and turn the top to the bottom when you set the dumplings in the pan.
A short entry that assumes you already have the Roly-Poly dough on the counter and the oven hot. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- "4 of an inch" is ¼ inch"4 of an inch" is almost certainly ¼ inch -- the fraction bar appears to have dropped out in printing. Roll the dough about a quarter of an inch thick — thin enough to seal over the fruit, sturdy enough not to split as the apple softens and releases juice.
- The dough it points back toThe recipe assumes a Roly-Poly dough given elsewhere in the book; in booklets of this kind that is often a soda-raised biscuit dough (flour, baking soda with cream of tartar or sour milk, a little salt, fat rubbed in, milk to bind), though a suet crust is also common for Roly-Poly. Any modern rich biscuit or shortcrust dough works; a biscuit dough browns and puffs, a shortcrust stays crisper.
- Squares to fit the appleFor a whole medium apple you need roughly a 7-inch square; for a half, about 5 inches. Cut generously — corners that barely meet will spring open in the oven.
- Seal, then invertFor the variant where the apple is cut into pieces, the recipe tells you to pinch the seams and set the dumpling seam-side down in the pan. The weight of the dumpling helps hold the seam shut while the dough sets, keeping the syrup inside rather than burnt on the pan.
- Oven and timeBake at 375–400F for 40 to 50 minutes for whole apples, 30 to 35 for halves or pieces. The pastry browns well before the fruit is done; the test is a skewer sliding through the apple without resistance.
- Filling amountsNo quantities are given. Reckon on a tablespoon of sugar, a good pinch of cinnamon and a teaspoon of butter per whole apple, spread over the top as the recipe directs.
- Choice of appleUse a firm baking apple — Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy — which holds shape through a long bake. Soft eating apples collapse into sauce and the dough sags into the puddle.
- The panSet the dumplings in a buttered dish with sides, not on a flat sheet. Juice always escapes somewhere, and in a shallow dish it reduces to syrup you can spoon back over.
- YieldOne whole-apple dumpling per person; the recipe gives no quantity of dough, so the batch size depends on the Roly-Poly recipe you are working from.
Baked apple dumplings belong to the same family as the fruit puddings that fill nineteenth-century American cookbooks — Roly-Poly, bird's nest pudding, apple pandowdy — all of them ways of stretching pastry over cheap autumn fruit. If the booklet was indeed published to sell bicarbonate of soda, its dough would be a chemically leavened one: soda with an acid, either cream of tartar or sour milk, in place of the yeast or long beating a cook would otherwise need. Promotional recipe pamphlets of this sort circulated very widely in America from the later nineteenth century, given away by manufacturers of soda, cornstarch, gelatine and baking powder.