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Fruit Flip Flaps
Mix together 1 pint of flour, 1 teaspoonful of sugar, ½ teaspoonful of salt and 2 scant teaspoonfuls of baking-powder and rub in 2 heaping tablespoonfuls of butter. Mix to a soft dough which can just be cut with a spoon. Butter deep muffin pans and half fill them with the dough.
Pare, core and cut fine a number of tart apples.
Put an inch layer of them in each pan, sprinkle thickly with grated maple sugar and drop in each 1/4 teaspoonful of butter. Bake in a quick oven and serve hot with cream.
Poor Man's Pie (Apple Dish) Pare 6 large greenings (apples); sprinkle generously with sugar and cinnamon. Take about 1 pint of buttermilk with large lumps of butter floating in it. Beat 2 eggs till light, add ½ cupful of sugar, 2 teaspoonfuls of soda, a pinch of salt and 1 pint of flour. Make a smooth batter, spread evenly over the prepared apples and place in the oven to bake. Serve with milk or cream sweetened with sugar. Cream which is thus treated goes much farther and is very delicious. Flavored with vanilla, it makes a pleasing change from plain cream.
A simple baking-powder dough baked in muffin tins under a layer of apple — essentially individual cobblers. A few of the measurements need translating before you start.
- A pint of flourDry ingredients here are measured by volume, not weight: 1 pint is 2 cups, roughly 8-9 oz of all-purpose flour. Two heaping tablespoons of butter is about 1.5 oz.
- The liquidNo liquid is specified, but the dough cannot come together without one. Add milk gradually — about 3/4 cup for 2 cups of flour — until you have a soft dough just stiff enough to cut and lift with a spoon.
- Butter dotsThe dab of butter dropped over each portion of apple is a quarter teaspoon, not fourteen teaspoons.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Individual portions in deep muffin pans will take about 20-25 minutes; the topping should be risen and browned and the apple tender when pierced.
- Maple sugarGrated maple sugar is the hard cake sugar sold in blocks, still available from maple producers. Maple sugar granules work identically; maple syrup does not, as the extra liquid will soak the dough. If substituting, use light brown sugar with a spoonful of syrup drizzled over the apple.
- Tart applesSomething firm that holds its shape — Granny Smith or Northern Spy. "Cut fine" means small dice, which cook through in the time the dough takes.
- Pan and yieldStandard deep muffin cups, filled half with dough and then an inch of apple, will heap above the rim. Set the tin on a sheet pan to catch juices. Expect 8 to 10, depending on pan depth.
- ServingServe hot, in the pan or turned out onto plates, with cream poured over. They are best eaten hot; they firm up as they cool.
This version belongs to the broad American family of apple cobblers, grunts, slumps and pandowdies — all ways of getting a fruit dessert out of one bowl of flour and whatever apples the cellar held. The maple sugar suggests New England or upstate New York, where maple was the local sweetener and cane sugar the imported one. Baking powder rather than saleratus and sour milk suggests a later date: chemical leaveners in reliable commercial form became a kitchen staple in the last decades of the nineteenth century.