Home › Desserts › Rhubarb Dumplings
Rhubarb Dumplings
Make a rich biscuit crust with 1 quart of flour, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 2 heaping teaspoonfuls of baking-powder, 4 tablespoonfuls of shortening and sufficient sweet milk to mix to a soft dough.
Roll out and cut in four-inch squares. Put I large spoonful of finely cut rhubarb and I piece of loaf sugar on each, draw the paste together, and pinch to keep the fruit from oozing. Place close together in a greased dripping pan. Pour in a scant ½ cupful of cold water, cover closely with a second pan and bake for forty minutes in a hot oven, uncovering ten minutes before serving.
The water keeps the crust from baking too hard.
Serve with hard sauce.
A steam-baked biscuit dumpling from the era when rhubarb was the first fruit of the year and sugar was still bought in loaves. The covered pan is the whole trick: it traps steam so the crust stays tender while the rhubarb cooks down.
- The hinge: keep it coveredThe scant half cup of water plus a second pan inverted over the first turns the dripping pan into a steam oven. Uncover only for the last ten minutes, which crisps and colours the tops. Skip the cover and you get hard, dry biscuit shells and undercooked fruit.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in these books; a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 2 oz of all-purpose. With 2 heaping teaspoons of baking powder to that much flour the rise is modest by modern standards, so measure generously or go to a tablespoon.
- ShorteningHere this means lard or butter, worked into the flour cold as for any biscuit. Four tablespoons to a quart of flour is a lean, sturdy dough meant to hold fruit without splitting, not a flaky pastry.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, distinguished from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that a farm kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk is the right substitute; expect to need about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups for a soft dough.
- Loaf sugarHard refined sugar, sold in loaves or cones and broken up, and by this period also available ready-cut in lumps; '1 piece' is probably near a modern sugar cube, roughly a teaspoon. Rhubarb is sharply acid and one lump per dumpling will read as barely sweet to most palates now; two teaspoons per dumpling is closer to modern taste, and the hard sauce is doing real work here.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'hot' in books of this kind is usually read as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Forty minutes covered suits a four-inch dumpling, and the last ten uncovered should brown the tops.
- The rhubarb itselfUse stalks only and cut them small, about 1/4 inch, so they collapse in the time given. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not eaten; trim them off and discard. Thick spring stalks may want stringing.
- SealingDraw the four corners of each square up over the fruit and pinch the seams firmly. Rhubarb throws a lot of juice, and any gap will leak syrup into the pan water.
- Yield and sauceA quart of flour rolled thin enough to cut four-inch squares gives about 10 to 12 dumplings, enough for 6 to 8. Hard sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar, about 1 part butter to 2 of sugar, flavoured with vanilla, nutmeg or a spoonful of brandy and chilled firm so it melts over the hot pastry.
Rhubarb earned the name pie plant in nineteenth-century America because that was among the most common uses for it: it came up in the kitchen garden in April, weeks before any tree fruit, and it went into pies, sauces and dumplings until the strawberries arrived. Dumplings of this kind, fruit tied up in a biscuit crust and baked or boiled, run right through Anglo-American cookery as a way of stretching a small amount of fruit and a small amount of sugar across a table, and a covered dripping pan gave a household without a steamer the same tender result. The recipe's appearance in a low-cost collection is no accident: rhubarb was the cheapest sweet thing available in spring, often growing untended at the edge of a yard, and the crust is flour, baking powder and four tablespoons of fat. The instruction to use loaf sugar recalls the period when sugar still arrived in hard cones to be broken up at home, a habit that survived in print well after granulated sugar had taken over the pantry.