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Boiled Apple Dumplings
Beat well without separating 2 eggs, add a pinch of salt, 1 pint of milk and 1 cupful of flour. To a second cupful of flour add 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder; add this to the batter, then as much more flour as may be needed to mix to a soft dough. Roll out quickly one-half of an inch in thickness. Cut into squares, lay 2 or 3 quarters of pared apples on each, draw the dough round them and pinch the edges together. Have ready a number of pudding cloths wrung out of cold water and dusted with flour. Put a dumpling in each, leave a little room for swelling, and tie tightly. Drop into a kettle of rapidly boiling water (have a saucer in the bottom to prevent burning) and keep the water at a steady boil for an hour. Serve hot with hard sauce.
A cloth-boiled dumpling of the old English kind, scaled for a large family. The dough is written loosely on purpose, and the cloths are the part most modern cooks will have to improvise.
- The dough is deliberately open-endedA pint of milk, two eggs and two cups of flour give a batter, not a dough; the "as much more flour as may be needed" is doing the real work and is likely to be several cups more. Add it in halves until the dough just leaves the bowl and is still soft — a stiff dough boils heavy.
- Pudding clothsSquares of unbleached muslin or doubled cheesecloth, about 12 inches, wrung out in cold water and floured on the inside. The wet flour forms a skin that keeps water out of the dough. Tie with kitchen string, leaving an inch of slack for swelling.
- The saucer in the kettleAn inverted saucer or a small trivet keeps the cloths off the metal floor of the pot, where they scorch. A folded tea towel or a round cake rack does the same job.
- Keep the boil steadyThis is the hinge. If the water stops boiling the dough stops rising and turns sodden, so keep a kettle of boiling water alongside to top up, and never add cold water. The dumplings must stay submerged throughout.
- An hour is for whole quartersThe time assumes a big dumpling around raw apple quarters. If your dumplings are smaller, or the apple is sliced thin, 35 to 45 minutes is enough — test by unwrapping one and running a skewer through to the centre of the fruit.
- ApplesUse a firm cooking apple that holds its shape: Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Soft eating apples collapse to sauce inside the crust over an hour of boiling.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, roughly one part butter to two parts sugar, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg and chilled firm. It is meant to melt over the hot dumpling at the table.
- YieldAs written this probably makes eight to ten large dumplings — one per person, and they are substantial. Halve it for a household of four.
Boiling a pudding in a floured cloth is an English technique that took hold in the seventeenth century, once cloth largely displaced the animal-gut bag and made puddings something a cook could produce in any pot over any fire, without an oven. Apple dumplings are the thrifty end of that tradition: a little flour, a little leavening and whatever windfall fruit was to hand, stretched into a hot filling course. The economy is the whole point — no oven fuel, no pie dish, one kettle on the stove doing the work of a bakery, and a sauce made of nothing but butter and sugar. The cloth survived wherever the range was small or the fuel budget was tight.