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Dumplings for Stews
2 cups sifted Gold Medal flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup milk Mix and sift the dry ingredients; mix with the milk and drop by spoonfuls into the boiling stew. Cover tight, cook for ten minutes. These may be dropped on a buttered plate and cooked in a steamer over fast boiling water. Apple Dumplings, No. 1 1/2 the rule for Shortcake No. 1 5 or 6 tart apples 1/2 cup water Pare, core and quarter the apples; place in a two quart granite pan with the water and let cook slowly while preparing the crust. Roll the crust out to exactly fit the pan, cut several gashes to let out the steam, lay it over the hot apples; cover with a deep pie plate, cook on top of the stove for half an hour; set the pan on a trivet, if necessary, to keep the apples from burning, then lift the cover and brown the crust in a hot oven. Invert on a large plate and serve with brown sugar sauce or hard sauce. This is excellent also steamed for forty minutes.
Apple Dumplings, No. 2 The rule for Shortcake No. 2 3 large apples 4 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon butter Roll the dough into a sheet and cut in five inch squares. Core and halve the apples. Fold each piece of apple in a square of paste, bringing the corners to the core. Turn dumplings upside down in a well buttered dripping pan. Dot with bits of butter, sprinkle with sugar. Set the pan in a quick oven and after ten minutes pour on boiling water to half cover. Baste often and bake about thirty minutes in a moderate oven. Serve with cream or the syrup from the pan.
Three recipes run together here: a plain drop dumpling for savory stews, and two apple dumplings that both depend on a shortcake dough given elsewhere in the book. The dumplings themselves are simple; the apple versions assume equipment and oven language that need translating.
- Keep the lid onThe hinge of the stew dumpling is the tight cover, which the recipe calls for explicitly. The spoonfuls go into the boiling stew and finish in trapped steam under the lid; lifting it during the ten minutes lets the steam out and tends to give heavy, gummy dumplings. Set a timer and leave it alone.
- The batter is soft on purposeTwo cups flour to one cup milk gives a thick drop batter, not a rollable dough. Flours vary, so add milk by the tablespoon if it will not fall from the spoon. Overmixing toughens it.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups flour is on the generous side of what is standard now but not unusual. Modern powder begins acting as soon as it is wetted, so get the spoonfuls into the pot promptly rather than letting the bowl stand.
- The shortcake rulesBoth apple dumplings send you to Shortcake No. 1 and No. 2 elsewhere in the book. Any rich biscuit dough will stand in: roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 4 to 6 tablespoons butter or shortening cut in, and about 2/3 cup milk.
- Granite panThat means graniteware, the speckled enameled steel of the era, not stone. A two-quart enameled or heavy stainless saucepan is the equivalent. The trivet under the pan is simply a heat diffuser to keep the apples from scorching over a direct flame.
- Oven temperaturesA quick oven is roughly 400 to 425F, a moderate oven around 350 to 375F. Apple Dumplings No. 2 therefore starts hot for ten minutes to set the pastry, then finishes at moderate heat for about half an hour once the water goes in.
- Browning the top crustFor No. 1, the crust steams under a pie plate on the stovetop and comes out pale. The recipe says only to brown it in a hot oven, without a time; watch it rather than trusting a clock. Use an ovenproof pan from the start so the whole thing can move without transferring.
- BastingThe boiling water poured around No. 2 becomes a thin syrup as the sugar and apple juice reduce. Baste every ten minutes or the exposed pastry dries; if the pan runs dry before the apples soften, add a few more tablespoons of boiling water.
- YieldApple Dumplings No. 2 gives six dumplings, since three apples are halved and each half wrapped. The recipe gives no yield for the stew dumplings or for No. 1.
Gold Medal, milled by Washburn-Crosby in Minneapolis, published cookbooks like this one largely to demonstrate what its flour could do, which is why a single page moves from a savory stew topping to two desserts without comment: all three are flour, leavening and liquid in different proportions. The drop dumpling for stew is one of the oldest surviving American kitchen economies, a way of stretching a thin pot of meat and vegetables into a full meal using nothing but pantry staples, and it appears in English and Pennsylvania German cooking alike. The apple dumpling has a longer and more regional history, generally traced in the United States to the mid-Atlantic and the Pennsylvania Dutch counties, where whole apples were wrapped in pastry and baked in syrup. The two versions given here show the split neatly: No. 1 is really a deep-dish apple pudding begun on the stovetop, while No. 2 is the individual wrapped dumpling that most readers would recognize today.