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Apple Dumpling
Make a biscuit dough same as for baking powder biscuit, only adding a little more shortening. Roll the dough almost as thin as for pie-crust, then cut into square pieces large enough to cover an apple. Put into the middle of each half of a good-sized apple (pared and cored); sprinkle with granulated sugar and a little ground cinnamon, turn ends of the dough over the apple and lap them tight. Lay the dumplings in well-buttered pan the smooth side upward; when the pan is filled put a small piece of butter on the top of each dumpling and sprinkle liberally with granulated sugar, turn in a cup of boiling water and bake in moderate oven about three-quarters of an hour. Baste once while baking, with sweetened hot water. Serve with pudding sauce.
— Mrs. Frederic E. Craigie
A baked apple dumpling of the plainest sort: biscuit dough, half an apple, sugar and cinnamon, and a syrup that forms in the pan as it bakes. The instructions assume you already know how to make baking powder biscuit.
- The doughStandard baking powder biscuit at about 2 cups flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 3/4 cup milk, but with the fat raised from the usual 3-4 tablespoons to about 6 for the extra shortening called for here. Shortening in this period meant lard or butter as often as anything else; either works, and the richer dough is what keeps the wrapper tender rather than bready.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F; period usage for "moderate" runs roughly 350-375F. Three-quarters of an hour at that temperature is right for apple halves, which cook through faster than the whole apples used in older dumpling recipes.
- Roll thin, but not too thin"Almost as thin as pie-crust" means about 1/4 inch for biscuit dough. Thinner than that and the dough tears where it laps over the apple, and the syrup leaks into the pan instead of staying with the fruit.
- Seal side down, then flip the phrasingThe dough is lapped over the apple and the dumpling is laid "smooth side upward," so the seam sits against the buttered pan where the heat sets it. This is the hinge of the recipe: a seam left on top opens as the dough rises.
- The cup of boiling waterPoured into the pan, not over the dumplings, and called for boiling so the bake is not stalled. With the butter and sugar on top it reduces to a light syrup. A pan roughly 9x13 suits six to eight dumplings; in a much larger pan the water is likelier to evaporate before it thickens.
- ApplesA firm cooking apple that holds its shape and turns tart against the sugar. Northern Spy, Baldwin and Greening were among the common New York apples of the period; Granny Smith, Braeburn or Cortland stand in well. Softer apples collapse into sauce inside the dough.
- BastingOnce while baking, with hot water sweetened with a little sugar; the recipe does not say at what point. This keeps the exposed dough from drying and glazes the tops.
- Pudding sauceIn this period that usually meant a hard sauce or a warm vanilla sauce: butter creamed with powdered sugar and a little flavoring, or a cornstarch-thickened sweet sauce. Either suits here.
- YieldAbout six to eight dumplings from the dough quantity above, one per person as dessert.
Apple dumplings belong to the older tradition of boiled suet-and-flour puddings, and the American baked version, wrapped in biscuit or pie dough and set in a pan of sweetened water, is often associated with Pennsylvania and the Hudson Valley in the nineteenth century. What marks this receipt as belonging to its moment is the baking powder: chemical leavening became cheap and reliable in American kitchens after the Civil War, and a cook who once would have made a suet crust or a plain short paste could now turn out an enriched biscuit dough in minutes. A signed "village receipt" like this one is a reminder that community cookbooks of the period were less about invention than about recording whose version of a common dish was worth copying.