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Baked Peach Dumplings
Make up one quart of flour as for soda biscuit. Roll like pastry, putting on bits of lard or butter several times. Make out the dough like biscuit, roll thin and on each piece put two or three pieces of canned peaches. (Peach preserves or marmalade would answer also.) Add a teaspoonful of butter, and (if you use canned peaches) a tablespoonful of sugar to each dumpling. Draw the edges firmly together and place them in a deep, large baking-dish. Put sugar and butter between, and pour, over all, the syrup from the can. (Use a three-pound can for this quantity of flour.) Bake quickly and serve with or without sauce. A good substitute for the old-fashioned "pot peach pie." Baked apple dumplings may be made in the same way.--Mrs. S.T.
A soda-biscuit dough, laminated with fat like rough puff pastry, wrapped around canned peaches and baked in their own syrup. The instructions assume you already know how to mix biscuit dough, so the useful detail is in the proportions and the oven.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in this book: a quart is about 4 cups, roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter. That makes a large batch; the recipe gives no yield, but expect something on the order of a dozen dumplings in the "deep, large baking-dish" it calls for.
- "As for soda biscuit"The period formula is flour, salt, fat, and soda plus an acid liquid, usually buttermilk or sour milk. For 4 cups flour, figure 1 teaspoon soda, 1 teaspoon salt, about 1/2 cup lard or butter cut in, and enough buttermilk to make a soft dough. If you use sweet milk, use baking powder instead of soda.
- The folding"Putting on bits of lard or butter several times" means dotting the rolled dough with fat, folding, and rolling again two or three times. This is what gives the crust its flaky layers, and it is the step that separates this from a plain dropped dumpling. Keep the fat cold.
- "Bake quickly"That means a hot oven; the recipe gives no temperature, but something in the range of 425 to 450F answers to it. Soda biscuit dough needs the initial blast to set and rise; a slow oven leaves it heavy and lets the syrup soak the bottom crust. Timing depends on size — start checking around 30 minutes, and bake until well browned.
- A three-pound canCanned goods of the period ran to odd sizes. Three pounds is 48 ounces including the syrup, so a little short of two modern 28-oz cans; drained, that is several cups of fruit, plus the syrup to pour over.
- If you use preserves insteadThe recipe tells you to skip the added sugar with preserves or marmalade, which is right; they are already heavily sweetened. You will also have no can syrup to pour over, so use a thin sugar syrup or fruit juice, about a cup, to keep the dish from going dry.
- Sealing them"Draw the edges firmly together" matters more than usual here, since the dumplings sit in liquid. Moisten the edges and pinch hard, then set them seam-side down so the syrup does not lift the seam open.
- Sauce and servingThe "sauce" intended is a sweet pudding sauce, typically butter creamed with sugar and thinned with cream or a little wine. Cream or the pan syrup spooned over serves as well. Serve warm; the crust turns leathery once cold.
"Pot peach pie" appears to have been the older, more rustic thing the recipe says it replaces — fruit cooked in a pot with dough over it, rather than baked — though the recipe itself says only that this is "a good substitute" for it. What makes this version modern for its moment is the can: Housekeeping in Old Virginia was published in 1878, and commercial canning had expanded enormously in the decade after the Civil War, so a Virginia household could put peach dumplings on the table in February rather than only in August. The contributed-recipe format, with "Mrs. S.T." as the source, is typical of Marion Cabell Tyree's book, which gathered receipts from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers and printed them largely as written, contradictions and all.