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Apple Sugar Dumplings
Sift an even quart of Five Roses flour twice with 1½ teaspoons baking powder, and ½ teaspoon salt. Chop into this a tablespoon cottolene or other fat and one of butter. Mix into a soft dough with 2 cups milk; roll out into a sheet a scant ½ 1/2 inch thick, and cut into squares about 5 inches each way. Lay in centre of each a large tart apple, pared and cored. Fill space left by coring with sugar, fold the corners together, enveloping the apple, tie up in cheese cloth squares, dipped into hot water, and well floured on the inside.
Have ready a pot of boiling water. Drop in the dumplings and cook fast one hour.
Dip each for one second in cold water to loosen the cloth, turn out upon a hot dish and eat with hard sauce. -Selected.
A boiled apple dumpling of the pudding-cloth school, from a Canadian flour company's promotional book. The dough is a rich biscuit dough, and the whole success of the thing rests on the cloth.
- The cloth is the hingeScald each cheesecloth square, wring it out, and flour the inside heavily while it is still damp — the flour and water form a skin that keeps the boiling water out of the dough. A dry or thinly floured cloth lets water in and you get a grey, sodden crust.
- An even quart of flourFlour was measured by volume: a quart is 4 cups, sifted, or roughly a pound. Sifting twice is not decorative here — it is how the small amount of baking powder gets distributed.
- CottoleneA brand of shortening made from cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, heavily advertised in the late nineteenth century and long gone. Use vegetable shortening or lard in the same quantity, with the tablespoon of butter as written.
- Leavening looks light1½ teaspoons baking powder to 4 cups flour is well under modern proportions, but this is a boiled dough that steams inside a cloth rather than a baked biscuit. It will be dense and close-textured by design.
- Apples"Large tart apple" means a cooking apple that holds together for an hour: Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy. Softer eating apples collapse into sauce inside the crust.
- Boiling and roomUse the largest pot you have and keep the water at a full rolling boil the whole hour, topping up with boiling water from a kettle. The dumplings must float freely; crowded, they cook unevenly and the cloths stick to one another.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with icing or caster sugar and flavoured with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, chilled firm. It is meant to melt over the hot dumpling and is not optional to the dish as conceived.
- YieldThe dough should make roughly half a dozen 5-inch squares, and so about that many dumplings — one apple per person, generously sized.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and given away or sold cheaply with its flour; editions circulated in enormous numbers through Canadian kitchens in the early twentieth century. Many of its recipes, like this one, are marked "Selected" — contributed or reprinted rather than developed in a test kitchen. The dumpling itself belongs to the older British tradition of the boiled pudding, where anything wrapped in a floured cloth and dropped into a kettle could be cooked over a single fire alongside the rest of dinner. That method predates the reliable domestic oven and survived well into the era of the coal range, largely because it needed no oven at all. By the time this book appeared, baked apple dumplings are often said to have been the more common form; the boiled version reads here as an inherited technique passed along by a contributor rather than the newest thing the millers had to offer.