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Syrup (Tablespoon Five Roses flour)
4 cups sugar. 1 tablespoon Five Roses flour 1 tablespoon butter Nutmeg to taste.
Mix and add 1 quart boiling water, stirring while adding. Pour over the dumplings in pan, and bake 1/2 to 3/4 hour in rather hot oven. Baste dumplings with the sauce when half done and bake a nice brown. Serve with whipped or plain cream.
This is not a syrup in the boiled-sugar sense but a thin basting sauce poured around baked dumplings so they steam from below and glaze on top. A few things in the text need reading carefully before you start.
- The missing sugarAs printed the mixture is flour, butter, nutmeg and water, which will not make anything anyone would call a syrup. Other dumpling sauces of the period generally include sugar, often something on the order of a cup to a tablespoon each of flour and butter; the omission may well be a typesetting loss rather than an intention.
- "Bake to hour"Another gap in the printing. The likely reading is half an hour to an hour. In practice the dumplings govern the timing: they are done when the pastry is browned through.
- "Rather hot oven"Somewhere around 400F, at the top end 425F; period usage of these oven terms is loose. Hot enough to set and colour the pastry before the sauce soaks it soft, which is the whole point of basting rather than submerging.
- A quart of liquidFour cups is a great deal of sauce for a single tablespoon of flour, so expect something very thin; it will reduce somewhat in the oven but will not thicken much. In a shallow modern dish the same quantity will boil over; use a roasting pan with two inches of clearance, or scale the sauce to half.
- Mixing orderRub the flour into the softened butter first, then pour the boiling water in slowly while stirring, or the flour will seize into lumps. Adding it gradually and whisking hard is more reliable than the original's single pass.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aromatic oils within months, and at this dilution — one quart of liquid — anything stale simply will not register.
- BastingSpoon the pan liquid over the exposed tops once at the halfway mark and again ten minutes before the end. This is what produces the lacquered brown the recipe asks for; without it the tops stay pale and floury.
Baked dumpling sauces like this one belong to a long Anglo-North American habit of building a pudding sauce directly in the baking dish rather than making it separately: the flour and butter thicken as the liquid reduces. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households from 1913 onward, was a promotional book, which is why a tablespoon of thickening flour gets top billing in the title. Apple dumplings baked in syrup were a familiar autumn dish, and the instruction to serve with "whipped or plain cream" reflects a period when cream was a farm commodity rather than a purchase. Nutmeg as the sole spice is characteristic of nineteenth-century British-descended baking, where it did duty in everything from custards to rice pudding.