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Syrup (Tablespoon butter)
3 cups water. 1 cup sugar. 1 tablespoon butter.
Put on stove and let come to a boil.
Pour over the dumplings and bake in hot oven.
This is a fragment: a boiled sugar syrup poured over dumplings set in a baking dish. As printed here only the butter survives, so treat the quantities below as a caution rather than a conversion.
- The ingredient list is incompleteA syrup of this kind needs sugar and water or milk alongside the butter, and the printed text gives neither. Any amount stated for them would be invented; use the proportions from a syrup recipe you already trust.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period a hot or quick oven is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F, though the book gives no scale of its own. Baked dumplings sitting in syrup tend to do better at the lower end, which lets the dough cook through before the sugar catches at the edges of the dish.
- Pour it boilingThe recipe is explicit that the syrup is brought to a boil before it goes over the dumplings, so it hits them hot rather than being warmed through in the oven.
- Depth of syrupThe recipe gives no quantity, so the depth is left to the cook; enough to sit around the dumplings rather than submerge them is the usual approach for this kind of dish.
- TimingThe recipe gives none. Biscuit-dough or pastry dumplings of ordinary size will generally want something in the region of 30 to 40 minutes; judge by a skewer coming out of the centre clean and the syrup thickening around them.
- BastingSpoon syrup from the dish over the dumplings once or twice during baking. It builds the lacquered top that this style of dessert is made for.
- ServingThe recipe gives no yield. Serve warm with the pan syrup and cream; a sugar syrup of this kind will stiffen as it cools.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its Five Roses flour, and it is organised around what flour can be made to do -- hence a whole section on dumplings, boiled and baked. Baked dumplings with a hot syrup poured over belong to a broad Anglo-Canadian and American family that includes apple dumplings and, as a later relative, the "pouding chômeur" and maple-syrup dumplings of Quebec, generally dated to the Depression years of the late 1920s and 1930s, where a plain dough is dropped into or under a boiling sweet liquid and finished in the oven. The construction is thrifty by design: flour, fat and sugar with fruit optional, and no eggs.