Home › Dessert › Apple Dumplings
Apple Dumplings
One quart of flour, a piece of butter the size of an egg, two heaping teaspoonfuls of baking powder, a little salt; mix with sweet milk or water. Make some nice apple sauce and put a tablespoonful in each dumpling, butter the steamer well and steam about half an hour; if the apples are tender, they can be sliced and placed in the dumplings without cooking first.
This is a biscuit dough wrapped around applesauce and steamed rather than baked — closer to a dumpling in the English suet-pudding sense than the baked, syrup-bathed apple dumpling most American cooks know. The measurements are volumetric and old-fashioned but all translate cleanly.
- A quart of flourFlour was sold and measured by volume; a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 500 g. Scoop and level rather than packing it in.
- Butter the size of an eggThe standard nineteenth-century shorthand for about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Rub it into the flour cold, as for biscuits, so the dough steams up light.
- Baking powderTwo heaping teaspoons for 4 cups of flour is on the low side by modern standards — today's ratio is about 1 to 1¼ teaspoons per cup. Early powders were also single-acting, so mix and get the dumplings into the steamer promptly.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because sour milk was equally common in the kitchen and would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Add it a little at a time to a soft, just-cohesive dough.
- ShapingRoll or pat the dough about ½ inch thick, cut rounds of 4 to 5 inches, put a tablespoon of sauce in the centre and pinch the edges tightly closed. A leaking seam is the usual failure; seal it well and set each dumpling seam-side down.
- The steamerButter it generously as directed, and do not crowd — the dumplings expand and will fuse together. Keep the water at a steady boil and resist lifting the lid, as a drop in steam collapses the rise.
- TimingHalf an hour is accurate for dough of this thickness. If you use raw sliced apple as the alternative suggests, choose a variety that softens quickly (McIntosh, Cortland) and slice it thin, since 30 minutes of steam will not tenderise thick pieces of a firm baking apple.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly 8 to 10 dumplings. The original gives no sauce; dumplings of this kind were often served hot with cream, a sweetened hard sauce, or a thin sugar-and-butter sauce flavoured with nutmeg.
Steamed apple dumplings sit at the point where the English boiled pudding met American chemical leavening. Through much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a dumpling commonly meant fruit tied up in a floured cloth and boiled; commercial baking powders, which spread through American kitchens from the 1850s and 60s onward, together with tiered tin steamers for the cookstove, let a cook use a quick soft dough instead of suet or pastry and steam it clean and dry. The instruction to fill the dumplings with ready-made applesauce is a thrift note as much as a shortcut — applesauce was made in quantity in autumn and kept in crocks, so a batch of dumplings could be produced from the store cupboard long after fresh apples had gone soft.