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Cranberry Slump
Make a biscuit dough with 1 pint of flour, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1/2 of a teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder and milk to mix.
In a pudding dish put i quart of washed cranberries, add 1 cupful of sugar and ½ of a cupful of water and cover with the crust. Cover and cook slowly in a moderate oven for one hour. Dust with sugar and serve with cream or a sweet sauce.
A slump is a steamed fruit pudding rather than a baked pie, and almost everything that can go wrong here comes from treating it like the latter. The measurements are volumetric in the older style and need translating before you start.
- Keep the lid onThe dish is covered for the full hour so the biscuit crust steams rather than browns. Lifting the cover to check colour defeats the method; the top should finish pale, soft and set through, not crisp.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume, so a pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz. A quart of cranberries is about 1 lb, a little over one standard 12 oz bag.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F (a moderate oven is usually reckoned 350-375F). At that temperature and covered, an hour is right for the berries to collapse into syrup and the dough to cook through to the underside.
- The saltThe printed page gives half a teaspoonful of salt, as our text now reads. That suits the pint of flour, which is about two cups.
- Leavening is light by modern standardsOne teaspoon of baking powder for 2 cups of flour is well under what a current biscuit recipe would call for, which is nearer a tablespoon. Two teaspoons gives a lighter crust with today's product.
- Milk to mixExpect about ¾ cup for a soft, droppable dough. It should be wetter than a rolled biscuit dough, since it sits on wet fruit and steams rather than bakes.
- SweetnessOne cup of sugar to a quart of raw cranberries makes a tart pudding. Taste-minded cooks add another 1/4 to 1/2 cup; the sweet sauce at the end is doing real work here.
- YieldProbably about six servings; the recipe does not specify the dish, but a 2-quart pudding dish suits the quantities. Serve warm — cold, the crust goes heavy and the syrup stiffens with the berries' own pectin.
Slumps and grunts are New England fruit puddings, a biscuit crust dropped or laid over sweetened fruit and cooked covered, traditionally on the stovetop in a kettle and later, as here, in the oven. The names are generally traced to the sound of the fruit bubbling under the dough and to the way the whole thing slumps on the plate when spooned out; Louisa May Alcott's Concord house was named Apple Slump, after the dish. Cranberries make it a distinctly regional entry: commercial bogs on Cape Cod and in New Jersey put the fruit into wider circulation through the second half of the nineteenth century, and a quart of berries, a cup of sugar and a pint of flour was about as inexpensive as a hot dessert could be.