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Canned Peach Dumplings
Canned peach or apricot dumplings made with rice covering are delicious. Partially boil the rice until soft enough to adhere to the fruit drained from the juice. Tie into cheese-cloth squares and steam until the rice is perfectly tender. Thicken the juice with arrowroot or corn-starch; add a little lemon juice and serve hot.
A thrift-era dessert that turns a can of fruit and a handful of rice into something served hot with sauce. The original assumes you know how far to cook rice before it will cling, which is the whole trick.
- The hinge: parboil, don't cookThe rice should be boiled about 10 minutes in plenty of water s still past crunchy and starchy enough to be sticky, but well short of done. Fully cooked rice slumps off the fruit; undercooked rice never softens in the steamer.
- Choose a starchy riceShort- or medium-grain rice (arborio, sushi rice, pudding rice) releases the surface starch that helps the coating adhere. Long-grain and converted rice are less likely to hold together.
- Draining the fruitDrain the peach or apricot halves thoroughly and blot them dry, and keep every drop of the syrup for the sauce. Wet fruit thins the rice coating and it slides.
- Cheesecloth squaresUse a double layer, dip each square in water and wring it out, then press a layer of rice over the fruit, gather the cloth and tie loosely with kitchen string. The rice swells, so leave slack or the dumpling splits the cloth.
- Steaming timeFigure 30 to 40 minutes in a covered steamer over simmering water, topping up the water as needed. The rice should be uniformly tender with no chalky center.
- Thickening the syrupCornstarch needs about 1 tablespoon per cup of juice and a full minute at a boil to lose its raw taste. Arrowroot needs roughly half that amount, goes in as a cold slurry, and should be brought just to the point of thickening and no further s boiled hard it turns thin and slippery.
- LemonCanned syrup is flatly sweet; a teaspoon or two of lemon juice per cup of sauce is what makes it taste of fruit. Add it off the heat, after thickening.
- YieldOne canned peach half per dumpling, two per serving. A standard 15-oz can gives four to six halves, or about two to three servings.
Boiled and steamed dumplings tied in a cloth are one of the oldest forms of English pudding, and the technique survived in American cookbooks long after most puddings had moved into basins and baking dishes. What is unusual here is the rice: wheat flour and suet were the traditional wrappers, and rice appears in cheap-cookery collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the less expensive, less rich substitute. Canned peaches and apricots made the dish possible year-round. Arrowroot and cornstarch sit side by side in the instruction because both were pantry staples then; arrowroot was the more genteel and the more expensive of the two.