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Boiled Apple Dumplings
Add to two cups sour milk one tea-spoon soda, and one of salt, half cup of butter, lard, flour enough to make dough a little stiffer than for biscuit; or make a good baking-powder crust; peel and core apples, roll out crust, place apples on dough, fill cavity of each with sugar, encase each apple in coating of the crust, press edges tight together, (it is nice to tie a cloth around each one), put into kettle of boiling water slightly salted, boil half an hour, taking care that the water covers the dumplings. They are also very nice steamed. To bake, make in same way, using a soft dough, place in a shallow pan, bake in a hot oven, and serve with cream and sugar, or place in a pan which is four or five inches deep (do not have the dumplings touch each other); then pour in hot water, just leaving top of dumplings uncovered. To a pan of four or five dumplings, add one tea-cup sugar and half a tea-cup butter; bake from half to three-quarters of an hour. If water cooks away too much, add more. Serve dumplings on platter and the liquid in sauce-boat for dressing. Fresh or canned peaches may be made in the same way.
Three methods in one entry: boiled, steamed, and baked. The boiled version is the older one and the least familiar today, and it is the one that needs the most attention to detail.
- The hinge: keep the water at a steady, gentle boilA hard rolling boil batters the crust and drives water into the seams, and dumplings that surface uncovered cook unevenly. Keep them fully submerged in water that is just moving, and top up with boiling water as needed.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Modern pasteurised milk spoils rather than sours; use buttermilk cup for cup. Two cups buttermilk to one teaspoon soda is a sound ratio.
- "Half cup of butter, lard"Most likely half a cup of fat in total, butter or lard or a mixture of the two, rather than half a cup of each; the punctuation is ambiguous, but half a cup of each would be a very rich dough for this quantity of liquid.
- Flour "enough"Expect somewhere in the region of four to five cups for a biscuit dough on this much liquid, and more again for "a little stiffer"; the book gives no figure. Add it in stages and stop when the dough holds a seam without cracking.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no numbers; "a hot oven" is conventionally read today as roughly 425-450F. For the deep-pan baked version with water, sugar and butter, around 375F is safer over the stated 30-45 minutes, since the syrup can scorch at the higher end.
- The clothPudding cloths should be scalded, wrung out and floured on the inside before wrapping, and tied with room for the dough to swell. A double layer of cheesecloth works. Without a cloth, the crust seam must be pinched hard and set seam-down in the water.
- Choose apples that hold togetherA half hour of boiling collapses a soft apple into sauce inside the crust. Firm baking varieties -- Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy -- keep their shape better. Smaller apples are the safer choice for the stated time; a large one may still be raw at the core.
- YieldThis is a generous batch of dough; the recipe only tells us a baking pan holds four or five dumplings. Expect eight or more depending on apple size, with one apiece a substantial serving after a meal.
Boiled dumplings belong to the era of the open hearth and the single large kettle, when a pudding tied in a floured cloth could hang in the same water that was cooking something else. Buckeye Cookery, first published in Minneapolis in 1877 and revised repeatedly through the 1880s, was compiled from contributions by Ohio and Midwestern housewives, and its instructions still assume the reader owns pudding cloths and knows how to use them. Baking is what most American cooks came to mean by an apple dumpling once ranges with reliable ovens became common. The deep-pan variant, with sugar and butter and water poured around the dumplings to make their own sauce, resembles the syrupy baked apple dumplings still associated with Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley. Sour milk and soda appear throughout the book as the standard leavening; commercial baking powder was available by the 1870s but still an alternative rather than the default, which is exactly how this recipe presents it.