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Paddy Bundles
6 tablespoons (heaping) Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 3 dessertspoons (heaping) butter Sweet milk (or cold water) to make soft dough.
Cut in 4 pieces. Do not roll, but on each piece put a peeled apple with core removed. With floured hands work the dough up around the apple. Fill the hole with sugar, butter and a couple of cloves.
Work the dough right up over the hole.
Brush over with sweet milk. Place in a pan, adding a little sweetened water.
Bake 40 minutes. Serve with cream and sugar or the sauce in which they were cooked.
A four-serving apple dumpling with almost no fixed measurements: the dough is given in spoonfuls, the oven temperature not at all. A few numbers make it repeatable.
- The spoon measuresSix heaping tablespoons of flour is roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup, and a dessertspoon is about two teaspoons, so three heaping dessertspoons of butter comes to something like 2 to 3 tablespoons. Aim for a soft biscuit dough, adding milk a spoonful at a time.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A dumpling of this size wants 375F for the stated 40 minutes: hot enough to set and brown the dough, gentle enough for the apple to cook through.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk. The term distinguished it from sour milk or buttermilk, which were common in kitchens of the period and would have called for soda instead of baking powder.
- Do not roll the doughThe instruction is deliberate. Patting the soft dough up around the apple with floured hands keeps it tender; rolling and stretching it makes a tough jacket that splits as the apple steams.
- Seal the topThe sugar and butter in the core will liquefy and run. Pinch the dough closed over the hole and set the dumplings seam-side up so the filling stays inside rather than bleeding into the pan.
- ClovesTwo whole cloves per apple is assertive by modern taste and they must be picked out at the table. A pinch of cinnamon or a grating of nutmeg does the same work more quietly.
- The liquid in the panAbout half a cup of water with a tablespoon or two of sugar, poured around rather than over the dumplings. It reduces to the light syrup the recipe offers as sauce; check partway through and add a splash if the pan runs dry.
- ApplesUse a firm baking apple that holds its shape, such as Northern Spy, Bramley or Granny Smith. A soft eating apple collapses into sauce inside its crust well before 40 minutes are up.
- YieldFour dumplings, one per person, served warm.
"Paddy" was a stock nineteenth-century nickname for an Irishman; the name is traditional rather than documented, and the recipe itself is simply an apple dumpling of the kind found across British, Irish and North American home cookery. Apple dumplings were long tied in a floured cloth and boiled, and cookbooks are often said to have kept them among the boiled puddings even after the method shifted to baking in a pan, as it has here. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed with its flour, and much of its contents came from Canadian housewives who sent in recipes, which accounts for the loose spoon measures and the assumption that the cook already knew how hot her oven should be.