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Crust (Cups Five Roses flour teaspoon)
2 cups Five Roses flour ¼ teaspoon (heaping) baking powder Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons (heaping) fresh lard and butter Sweet milk to make a dough.
Sift flour, baking powder and salt together. Cut in shortening and stir in milk. Roll to about 1 inch thick and wrap each half of apple and put in rather deep pan.
A baking-powder pastry for apple dumplings, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the dish. The instructions stop before the baking, and the trailing "4 cups sugar" belongs to a syrup the original never spells out.
- The missing syrupThe stray line of 4 cups sugar is unexplained; it most likely belongs to a syrup poured around the dumplings in the "rather deep pan," though the recipe never says so. Syrups of this kind are usually sugar with roughly an equal volume of water, boiled briefly, sometimes with butter, cinnamon or nutmeg. Four cups is a great deal by current taste; half that, with 2 cups water, gives a lighter sauce.
- No oven givenThe recipe stops before the baking. For a dumpling of this size, something in the range of 375-400F for 40-50 minutes should serve, until the pastry is browned and a skewer meets no resistance in the apple. Baste once or twice with any syrup in the pan.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose flour milled from hard spring wheat, somewhat stronger than most American all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; the dough will simply be a little more tender.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk, named to distinguish it from sour or buttermilk, which the period used as a leavening partner for soda. Expect roughly 3/4 cup for 2 cups of flour — add it gradually, since flours vary.
- Heaping tablespoons of shorteningTwo heaping tablespoons of mixed lard and butter comes to something like 1/4 cup, roughly 55 g, though a heaping spoon is an elastic measure. Lard gives the flakiness, butter the flavour.
- One inch is too thickA full inch of pastry is likely to stay underdone against the fruit; roll to about 1/4 inch and cut squares large enough to wrap a half apple with the corners meeting on top.
- The applesPeel and core the halves; a firm cooking apple that holds its shape is wanted. Baldwin, Northern Spy and Greening were among the varieties in use then — Granny Smith or Braeburn stand in.
- YieldTwo cups of flour wraps four apple halves generously, or six if rolled thin. Serve warm with the pan syrup and cream.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour; much of its content was solicited from customers, which accounts for the elliptical, kitchen-table style of entries like this one, where the writer assumed her reader knew that dumplings go into syrup and come out of an oven. Apple dumplings themselves are older than any of the milling companies — a British and Pennsylvania-German staple that crossed into Canada with both traditions — and the shift visible here is the pastry: chemical leavening was gradually and unevenly displacing the older suet crusts and boiled puddings, so the dumpling is a quick baking-powder dough rather than something tied in a cloth and dropped in a pot.