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Rolled Apple Dumplings
Peel and chop fine tart apples, niake a crust of one cup rich buttermilk, one tea-spoon soda, and flour enough to roll; roll half an inch thick, spread with the apple, sprinkle well with sugar and cinnamon, cut in strips two inches wide, roll up like jelly-cake, set up the rolls in a dripping-pan, putting a tea-spoon butter on each, put in a moderate oven, and baste them often with the juice.
A biscuit-dough apple roll rather than a true dumpling, and the whole thing hinges on liquid in the pan. Read the notes on basting before you start.
- The basting juiceThe recipe tells you to baste with "the juice," but chopped apples wrapped in dough release very little into a dry pan. Pour about a cup of water or cider mixed with a few tablespoons of sugar into the dripping-pan before baking, and spoon that over the rolls every ten minutes. Without it the crust bakes hard and the bottoms scorch.
- Moderate oven350F. The rolls need 35 to 45 minutes, until the crust is browned and a skewer goes through the apple without resistance.
- Soda and buttermilkOne teaspoon of soda to one cup of buttermilk is roughly double what modern practice usually calls for, and excess soda can leave a soapy taste and a yellowish crust. Half a teaspoon is the more usual modern proportion. "Rich" buttermilk most likely meant the thicker liquid left from churning rather than today's thin cultured product; whole-milk or full-fat cultured buttermilk is the closest supermarket match.
- "Flour enough to roll"About 2 to 2 1/2 cups for one cup of buttermilk, plus a good pinch of salt, which the original omits. Aim for a soft biscuit dough that just holds a rolled edge; overworking it makes the crust tough. Some fat, two or three tablespoons of butter rubbed in, improves it considerably.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll the dough into a rectangle half an inch thick, spread the apple over it, then cut the whole sheet into two-inch strips and roll each strip up from the short end. "Like jelly-cake" means a jelly roll: a spiral, cut side up.
- Dripping-panA shallow roasting or sheet pan with a rim, deep enough to hold basting liquid. Set the rolls upright with the spiral facing up and leave a little space between them.
- ApplesTart firm cooking apples, chopped fine as directed so they cook through in the same time as the crust. Bramley, Granny Smith or Northern Spy work; three or four medium apples fill this quantity of dough.
- Yield and servingRoughly eight to ten rolls, serving four to five. A sauce suits it -- hard sauce, cream, or the sweetened pan liquid spooned over -- though the recipe itself specifies none.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), compiled from the contributions of Ohio housekeepers, is full of buttermilk-and-soda doughs like this one. They belong to a period when chemical leavening had become cheap and reliable but butter and lard were still counted carefully, and a soda crust let a cook produce something rich-seeming from a cup of the liquid left over from churning. The dish sits at the blurry edge between dumpling, roll and pudding: apple dumplings of the era were often made by enclosing a whole cored apple in paste and boiling it in a cloth, while this version takes the spiral shape of the jelly cakes then common in American cookbooks and bakes it in a dripping-pan.