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Crust (Cups Five Roses flour level)
4 cups Five Roses flour 8 level teaspoons baking powder 1 cup butter 1½ cups milk Apples Nutmeg, if desired.
Pare and quarter the apples.
Sift flour and baking powder together. Mix in the butter. Add sufficient milk to make a stiff paste. Roll out ¼ inch thick, cut in large round pieces. Put several pieces of apple in each and fold into a ball. Bake in the following syrup: 3 cups water 1 cup sugar
This is a baking-powder pastry for apple dumplings, baked sitting in a sugar syrup rather than steamed or fried. The original assumes you know how a dumpling pan is set up and what oven you want, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: build the syrup firstBoil the 3 cups water with 1 cup sugar for a couple of minutes and pour it hot into the baking dish, then set the dumplings in it. The recipe does not say whether the syrup goes in hot or cold; going in hot should help set the crust rather than soak it, and the syrup reduces to a light sauce as the apples cook.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A hot-but-not-fierce oven suits it: 400F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then 375F for 30 to 40 minutes more, until the pastry is browned and a skewer goes through the apple without resistance. Baste with the syrup two or three times.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring-wheat flour, stronger than modern all-purpose. Use all-purpose and handle the dough as little as possible, or hold back 2 to 3 tablespoons of the milk and add it only if the dough will not come together.
- The butter and the milkA cup of butter to 4 cups flour is a rich short dough. Keep the butter cold and rub or cut it in to coarse crumbs rather than creaming it. "Stiff paste" means a dough that just holds a rolled sheet without cracking, firmer than biscuit dough.
- Baking powder, and saltEight level teaspoons is 2 per cup of flour, more than the 1 to 1½ teaspoons per cup usual today; 4 to 5 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder should give comparable lift. The recipe calls for no salt at all -- add half a teaspoon if you wish.
- Cutting and filling"Large round pieces" is not defined; rounds of roughly 5 to 6 inches across, cut round a saucer, will take two or three apple quarters each. Put the nutmeg inside if using it, then gather the edges up over the fruit and pinch them shut so the seam sits on top, not underneath.
- ApplesUse a firm cooking apple that holds its shape -- Northern Spy, Bramley, Granny Smith. Sweet dessert apples collapse into sauce inside the crust well before the pastry has browned.
- Pan and yieldNo yield is given; the quantities should make roughly 8 to 10 large dumplings. They need a deep dish or roasting pan where they sit close but not touching, with the syrup coming a third to halfway up; crowded dumplings steam instead of browning.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households that bought its flour, which is why every recipe in it specifies the brand by name. Dumplings of this kind -- fruit wrapped in a rich chemically-leavened dough -- sat between pie and pudding in the North American kitchen, and the syrup-baked version stood apart from the older boiled dumpling tied in a cloth. Baking powder had by then largely replaced the cook's own mixture of soda and cream of tartar, which is what makes a pastry like this quick enough to assemble between other jobs. Apples were the default winter fruit in Quebec and Ontario cellars, and a recipe headed simply "Crust" tells you the cook was expected to supply the filling from whatever was on hand.