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Strawberry Dumplings
Line muffin rings with thin-rolled sweet biscuit dough and bake quickly. When browned fill the shells with ripe strawberries, sprinkle sugar on top, and serve. Or make like conventional dumplings. (See "The Apple.")
Two dishes in three sentences: a baked shortcake shell filled with raw berries, or a steamed dumpling on the apple pattern given elsewhere in the book. The baked version is the one spelled out here, and it lives or dies on the dough being rolled thin and baked hot enough to set before it slumps.
- "Bake quickly"The book gives no temperature. In a modern oven this suggests a hot one, somewhere around 425-450F, with a thin shell likely needing only a short bake; pull it as soon as the edges are well browned, since a thin shell dries out fast.
- Muffin ringsThese were plain metal bands set on a flat baking sheet, not the connected muffin pan. Straight-sided tartlet tins, individual tart rings, or the cups of a standard muffin tin all work; line them with the dough as you would a pastry case.
- Sweet biscuit doughMost likely American biscuit dough with sugar added, i.e. shortcake dough, rather than a British sweet biscuit. The book gives no proportions; a workable modern stand-in would be about 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, half a teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons sugar, 4 tablespoons butter rubbed in, and about two-thirds cup milk. Handle it as little as possible.
- Blind-bakingAn unfilled shell rolled thin will bubble and lift. Prick it well, or line and weight it, and press the dough firmly into the corner of the ring so it does not shrink down the sides.
- The berriesThey go in raw and uncooked, so the fruit must be genuinely ripe and fragrant. The recipe simply fills the baked shells and sprinkles sugar over the top; if you prefer to hull, halve and sugar them ahead to draw juice, fill the shells at the last minute or the pastry softens.
- The dumpling alternativeThe cross-reference points to the book's apple entry, where the method for dumplings is presumably given; that text is not reproduced here. Strawberries give up far more liquid than apples, so a strawberry dumpling will need less cooking and will be wetter inside; treat any timing as trial and error.
- Yield and servingThe book gives no yield. The reconstructed dough above would line roughly six standard muffin cups and take on the order of a quart of berries. Serve warm the day it is made, with cream, plain or lightly whipped.
Strawberry shortcake in its American sense — sweetened biscuit dough rather than sponge cake, split or filled and heaped with barely sugared raw fruit — was well established by the late nineteenth century, and this is that dish reduced to individual portions. The muffin-ring shell belongs to a period when berries were seasonal and briefly abundant. The instruction to "make like conventional dumplings, see The Apple" is characteristic of these fruit compilations, which were organized by fruit rather than by method and expected the reader to carry a technique from one chapter to the next instead of repeating it.