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Berry Dumplings
Mix well together 1 pint of flour, 1/2 of a teaspoonful of salt, I heaping teaspoonful of bakingpowder and 1 teaspoonful of sugar. Rub in 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, then mix to a soft dough with sweet milk. Turn on a floured board, roll out half an inch thick, and cut in rounds the size of a tea saucer. On the center of each place several berries, about equal to 1 tablespoonful. Draw the paste up around them and pinch the edges tightly together. Set close together on a greased pan and steam for twentyfive minutes, then place in a hot oven long enough to dry off.
For the sauce, sift 1 cupful of powdered sugar.
Cream thoroughly I heaping tablespoonful of butter and gradually beat into it enough of the sugar to make a thick sauce. Have ready some of the berries mashed to a pulp. Add 1 teaspoonful at a time to the sauce, beating thoroughly before adding more. Watch closely, and if the sauce begins to look granular, or as if it would separate, add 1 tablespoonful more of sugar. Beat until very light, pile on a dish, and stand in the ice box until the dumplings are ready to serve.
A steamed dumpling with a fruit-flavored hard sauce, built from pantry staples. Two details do the heavy lifting: the dough must stay soft, and the sauce must be beaten, not melted.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume, so a pint means 2 cups (roughly 8 to 9 oz all-purpose). The proportions are close to a biscuit dough, though the butter here — 2 tablespoons to the pint — is leaner than most biscuit recipes call for.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk used in soda-leavened baking. Whole milk, added gradually — likely somewhere around 3/4 cup — but the recipe gives no quantity, so go by the dough, which should be soft and slightly sticky.
- The size of a tea saucerA period tea saucer runs somewhere around 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 inches across. Rounds that size cut half an inch thick use up the dough fast: expect about four, perhaps five or six with re-rolling, so four to six servings.
- Sealing is the hingeBerries release a lot of juice under steam. Pinch the seams hard and set the dumplings seam-side down, packed close so they brace each other; a split dumpling weeps its filling into the pan and steams into a soggy shell.
- Steaming without a steamerA covered pot with a rack above simmering water works, or a large steamer basket. Twenty-five minutes is accurate for this size — the dough should be dry to the touch and spring back when pressed.
- A hot ovenRead this as 425–450F, and only for five minutes or so. The oven stage is there to dry the damp surface left by steaming, not to brown or bake further.
- Powdered sugarBroadly what we would call confectioners' sugar, though powdered sugar of the period was ground from loaf or lump sugar and could be coarser and lumpier than the modern boxed product, which is why the recipe insists on sifting.
- Why the sauce curdlesThis is a hard sauce, an emulsion of butter and sugar, and berry pulp is mostly water. Adding it a teaspoon at a time with hard beating between additions keeps it together; more sugar restores a broken sauce because it absorbs the excess liquid.
- BerriesAny small soft berry works — blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, huckleberries. Frozen berries should be thawed and drained first, or the extra juice will burst the dumplings.
Steamed fruit dumplings belong to a long line of English boiled and steamed puddings that crossed to America and stayed well into the twentieth century: a plain biscuit or suet paste wrapped around whatever fruit was in season and cooked over water rather than in an oven, which mattered in a kitchen where fuel was counted. The dough costs pennies, the berries could be picked rather than bought, and the sauce turns a spoonful of fruit into something that looks like a company dessert. The sauce itself is a version of hard sauce — the term is generally an American one, while English cooks more often called the creamed butter-and-sugar mixture served with Christmas pudding brandy or rum butter — here tinted and flavored with the fruit of the dumpling. The reference to "the ice box" points to a household cooling with block ice, though the word stayed in use for some time after mechanical refrigerators appeared.