Home › Hot Desserts › Baked Apple Dumplings
Baked Apple Dumplings
One cup of butter and lard mixed, one quart of flour, salt to taste, three teaspoons of baking powder. Mix with milk. Pare and core apples. Roll out dough to cover each separately and fill the whole with sugar. Grate nutmeg over the top. Put in the pan with water to half cover. Put in that a half cup of sugar, and butter size of an egg. Baste while baking, allowing three-quarters of an hour, and your dumplings will come out with a delicious glaced brown crust.
Serve with a hard or a liquid sauce.- Mrs L. S. Baumgardner.
A short-crust dumpling baked in a shallow syrup rather than steamed, which is what gives the glazed crust the recipe promises. The measurements are volumetric and the oven temperature is left entirely to the cook.
- The quantities in modern termsA quart of flour is about 4 cups (roughly 1 lb 2 oz); 1 cup of mixed butter and lard is 8 oz of fat. That is a rich short crust, closer to a biscuit dough than a pie pastry, and it wants only enough milk to bring it together — around 1 to 1 1/4 cups.
- Butter the size of an eggA common nineteenth-century approximation, reckoned variously at about 1 to 2 oz (2 to 4 tablespoons) depending on the source. It goes into the pan liquid, not the dough.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was usual. Three-quarters of an hour suits a moderately hot oven, 375-400F — hot enough to set and brown the crust before the apples collapse, not so hot that the pan syrup scorches.
- The hinge: the water in the panHalf-covering the dumplings with sweetened water is what produces the glaze. As it reduces you baste with it, and the sugar in the liquid lacquers the pastry. Use a pan snug enough that the syrup does not spread thin and burn, and add a splash of hot water if it threatens to dry out before the apples are tender.
- Choose the apples for the timingForty-five minutes will turn a soft eating apple to sauce inside its crust. Firm baking varieties — Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy — hold their shape for the full bake. Medium apples, about 6 oz each, cook through in the time given; very large ones will not.
- Filling the cavity"Fill the whole with sugar" means the cored channel; about a tablespoon per apple. "Grate nutmeg over the top" is ambiguous and may mean over the sugared apple before wrapping or over the finished dumpling. Seal the dough at the top and pinch it firmly, or the sugar leaks out into the pan.
- YieldThe dough covers six to eight medium apples, depending on how thinly you roll. One dumpling per person.
- The saucesHard sauce is butter creamed with sugar and flavouring, served cold so it melts over the hot pastry. A liquid sauce here means a thin sweet sauce — cream, or a cornstarch-thickened sugar sauce with nutmeg or lemon.
Apple dumplings were a fixture of American home cooking long before this book, and the two schools — boiled or steamed in a cloth, and baked in a pan of syrup — coexisted through the nineteenth century. The mixture of butter and lard is characteristic of the period: lard gave shortness and cheapness, butter gave flavour. The attribution to Mrs L. S. Baumgardner marks this as a contributed recipe, the standard method by which community and magazine cookbooks of the era were assembled — readers sent in what worked in their own kitchens, oven temperatures and all, which is to say without them.