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Apple Dumplings in Cups
Line baking cups with thin pastry; fill up with slices of apple and sugar; place on each a cover of the pastry and. put them in a large baking-pan, pouring boiling water around the cups half way up, and bake in hot oven.
A short, assumption-heavy recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew how apple dumplings behaved. The gaps worth filling are quantities, oven heat and time.
- What a "baking cup" isIndividual earthenware custard cups, ramekins or ovenproof teacups, probably of about 6 to 8 oz. The recipe gives no quantities; for six cups, allow enough pastry for lining and lids and roughly 4 to 5 medium apples.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" is usually read today as somewhere around 425 to 450F. The recipe gives no further guidance; dropping to about 375F after the pastry has set will let the apples cook through without the lids browning too hard, though that is a modern adjustment rather than part of the instruction.
- TimingNone is given. Expect 35 to 45 minutes total, judged by a skewer sliding easily through the apple in the centre cup.
- The water bath is the hingeThe boiling water halfway up the cups moderates the heat on the sides and keeps the filling from scorching before the apples soften. Pour it in boiling, not cold, or the dumplings will sit in a cooling bath and steam sluggishly, and top it up if it boils away.
- SugarUnspecified here. About 1 tablespoon per cup suits a tart cooking apple; less for a sweet eating apple. A pinch of cinnamon or a scrape of lemon zest is period-appropriate and not an intrusion.
- ApplesUse a variety that holds some shape and has acid to spare, such as Bramley, Granny Smith or Northern Spy. Slice them thin and press the slices down firmly since they will shrink considerably.
- The pastry lidCut lids slightly larger than the cup rim, press them onto the dampened edge of the lining pastry, and cut a small vent. Sealed tight with no vent, the steam will lift the lid off.
- ServingOne cup per person, turned out or served in the cup, with cream, hard sauce or a thin custard. They are best warm rather than hot from the oven.
Apple dumplings in one form or another run through nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery: a whole cored apple wrapped in short or suet pastry, then boiled in a cloth or baked. The cup version here is often described as a later refinement, replacing the whole apple with sliced fruit and the pudding cloth with individual china, which gives a neat portion that can be sent to table without carving. The water bath is plausibly a holdover from an era of uneven wood- and coal-fired ovens, where a shallow pan of boiling water would have offered some defence against a fierce bottom heat scorching whatever sat directly on the oven floor.