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Apple Dumpling Slices
Make a biscuit dough and roll out thin, covering with a layer of fine sliced apples, and roll over as for roly poly. Then slice, set the pieces on end (as with domino rows), in a buttered pan, and pour over them a syrup of a cup of sugar and half a cup of water. Add a bit of butter for each dumpling and bake half an hour, or till brown.
A pinwheel version of apple dumplings, closer to what a modern cook would call an apple pinwheel or apple slice cake. The original assumes you already know how to make biscuit dough, so the quantities are left to you.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderately hot oven, around 375-400F, suits a baking-powder dough with a sugar syrup around it; the recipe's only guide is "bake half an hour, or till brown." It does not say how thick to cut the slices.
- The biscuit doughA standard proportion works: 2 cups flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 4-5 tablespoons cold butter or lard, and about 3/4 cup milk. Roll it thin, about 1/4 inch, or the roll will be doughy at the centre.
- The hinge is the syrup depthThe syrup -- A cup of sugar and half a cup of water are poured over the slices. Keeping the liquid to roughly halfway up the pieces, so the cut faces stay dry and brown while the bottoms poach in syrup, is a modern suggestion rather than anything the recipe specifies.
- Set on end means cut side upSet on end -- "On end (as with domino rows)" most likely means the spiral face is uppermost, set in rows. Whether the pieces were packed tight or spaced is not stated; packing them close will help them hold their shape.
- Apples"Fine sliced" means thin, not chopped. A firm tart variety such as Granny Smith, Braeburn or Northern Spy holds its shape in half an hour; softer supermarket apples collapse into sauce and wet the dough.
- Sugar and spiceSome period recipes left the apples plain, others sugared and spiced them. A tablespoon or two of sugar and a little cinnamon or grated nutmeg scattered on the apple layer before rolling would not be out of keeping.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of flour gives roughly 8-10 slices, enough for four to six. Serve warm from the pan with the syrup spooned over, and cream or hard sauce if you want it richer.
Apple dumplings in nineteenth-century American cookbooks came in two shapes: whole apples, cored and wrapped individually in pastry or biscuit dough, and rolled ones like this, where the dough is spread with fruit and coiled up in the manner of a jam roly-poly. The rolled version stretched a small amount of dough and a few apples across more servings, and slicing it into spirals turned a plain boiled pudding into something that browned in the oven. The roly-poly reference is a borrowing from English suet-pudding practice, adapted here to a chemically leavened biscuit dough of a kind that was coming into American kitchens as commercial baking powder gradually spread in the second half of the century. The syrup poured around the slices is doing the same job as the sauce served alongside an English dumpling, only baked in place, and the result has an obvious kinship with the apple pinwheel and the pan-syrup dumplings still common in the American South and Pennsylvania.