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Peach Dessert
Pare hard imperfect peaches and cut in quarters. Place in a large kettle with a little water and sufficient sugar to sweeten and stew slowly until soft. Have ready a thick batter made with 1 pint of flour, I heaping teaspoonful of bakingpowder, 1 teaspoonful of sugar, a pinch of salt and 1 scant cupful of milk. Drop this by spoonfuls over the top of the boiling fruit and cover closely. Keep where the boiling will be slow but steady for from ten to fifteen minutes without uncovering. Then dish, the fruit in the center and dumplings round the edge of the dish.
A steamed dumpling cobbler cooked entirely on the stovetop, from the era when a summer kitchen made oven baking unwelcome. Two details decide whether it works: the lid stays on, and the fruit must be at a steady simmer before the batter goes in.
- Do not lift the lidThe dumplings rise on trapped steam. Uncovering even briefly drops the temperature and leaves the tops pasty. Set a timer for 12 minutes and check only once, at the end, by pressing a dumpling top with a fingertip -- it should feel dry and springy, and a skewer should come out clean.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in these books: 1 pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz. Do not read it as a pint by weight.
- "Thick batter"With 2 cups flour and a scant cup of milk you get a stiff drop batter, closer to biscuit dough than pancake batter. It should hold its shape on the spoon. Add milk a tablespoon at a time only if it will not leave the spoon at all.
- Baking powderA heaping teaspoon for 2 cups of flour is on the light side by current practice; 2 level teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives a better rise. Mix the batter just before it goes into the pot, since the first reaction begins on contact with the milk.
- "Hard imperfect peaches"This is thrift writing -- underripe or bruised fruit that would not be served raw. Firm peaches genuinely work better here, holding their shape through the stewing. Ripe ones collapse to sauce, which is not a fault but makes a looser dessert.
- Sugar and waterFor about 2 lb of prepared peaches, start with 1/2 cup water and 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar, tasting once the fruit softens. There should be enough syrup that the dumplings sit on the fruit rather than in dry pan bottom, and enough headroom in the pot for them to double.
- The potUse a wide, heavy pan with a tight-fitting lid -- a Dutch oven is ideal. A slow but steady boil means low heat with visible movement at the edges; a hard boil scorches the syrup under the dumplings before they set.
- YieldProbably about six servings, though the recipe gives no figure. Best within an hour of cooking, while the dumplings are still light; cream or a thin custard poured over would be a plausible accompaniment.
Stovetop fruit-and-dumpling puddings run through nineteenth-century American cookery under a shifting set of names -- slump, grunt, cobbler, potpie -- the distinctions varying more by region and household than by any fixed definition. What they share is a leavened dough steamed on top of simmering fruit rather than baked, which saved fuel and kept a wood range from being fired up in August, exactly when peaches were cheap. The instruction to use "hard imperfect peaches" places this squarely in the low-cost tradition: windfalls and seconds, bought by the basket at the end of market day, cooked with enough sugar to make the flaws irrelevant. Baking powder in the batter dates the recipe to the later part of that century or after, when commercial powders were spreading, though unevenly, alongside the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method.