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Apple Dumplings
Three pints of flour, one and one-half pint of milk, one large tablespoonful of butter, one egg. As many apples (chopped fine) as the batter will take. Boil two hours in a well-floured cloth.
The water should be boiling when the dumplings are dropped in, and it should be kept boiling all the while, else they will be heavy. Eat with sauce.--Mrs.
A boiled cloth pudding rather than the baked pastry parcels the name suggests today. The whole thing hinges on keeping the water at a hard, unbroken boil.
- The measurementsThree pints of flour is about six cups by standard measure (nearer seven if read as dry pints), somewhere between one and a half and two pounds; a pint and a half of milk is three cups. This is a large quantity, and it halves cleanly.
- Batter or doughDespite the word "batter," the mixture has to be stiff enough to hold chopped apple and survive two hours in a cloth. Add the milk gradually and stop when you have a soft, cohesive dough rather than something pourable.
- No leaveningThere is no saleratus, baking powder or yeast here, only one egg. The result is dense by design; the warning about heaviness refers to the water going off the boil, not to any rise you have lost.
- The pudding clothA clean square of unbleached cotton or a double thickness of muslin, scalded, wrung out and floured heavily on the inside. Flour is what forms the skin that keeps water out. Tie it loosely enough to allow a little swelling, and suspend or rest the bundle so it does not sit on the pan bottom.
- Keeping it boilingTop up only with boiling water from a kettle. Cold water dropped into the pot stalls the cooking and the outside of the pudding turns sodden and grey.
- The applesA firm cooking apple that holds its shape, chopped small so it cooks through in the same time as the dough. No sugar or spice is specified, which is normal for a boiled pudding meant to be sweetened at table.
- Individual dumplings"When the dumplings are dropped in" suggests the dough may also be divided and each portion tied in its own small cloth, in which case they would need considerably less than the two hours given.
- The sauceThe recipe says only "eat with sauce" and leaves the choice open; a sweet sauce of some kind does most of the work, since the pudding itself contains no sugar.
Boiled dumplings and puddings tied in a floured cloth were a mainstay of English and American kitchens through the nineteenth century, when a single pot over an open fire was more dependable than an oven. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, collected contributions from named Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end with an attribution like this one; the contributor's surname appears to be missing here. Apples were an obvious fruit for such a pudding, since they kept in barrels or cellars through the winter.