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Apple Dumpling
4 teaspoons baking powder teaspoon salt cup sugar 1 cup milk few gratings lemon rind Mix and sift dry ingredients except sugar. Add milk. Fill a buttered pudding dish with apples, add sugar and lemon rind, cover with flour mixture, and steam one and one half hours. Serve with lemon sauce.
The transcription has lost at least one line: the flour is missing from the ingredient list, and the sugar and salt quantities are partly gone. What survives is a steamed cobbler-style pudding rather than the individual pastry-wrapped dumplings the name usually suggests.
- The missing flourFour teaspoons of baking powder to one cup of milk points to roughly 2 cups of flour, the standard proportion in books of this era (about 2 teaspoons baking powder per cup of flour). This is an inference from the leavening, not a figure recovered from the page.
- Other gaps"teaspoon salt" is almost certainly 1/2 teaspoon and "cup sugar" is likely 1/4 to 1/2 cup, but the numerals are simply absent. Treat both as approximations and taste the apple layer before covering it.
- ApplesNo quantity is given. A 2-quart pudding dish takes about 6 medium apples, peeled and sliced thick; a firm baking variety such as Braeburn or Golden Delicious holds shape better than the sharper cooking apples the original cook would have used.
- Steaming, not bakingThe dish is covered and set on a rack in a kettle with boiling water reaching partway up the sides, lid on, water kept at a steady simmer and topped up as it falls. The batter cooks by moist heat into a soft, pale, sponge-like crust — it will never brown, and that is correct.
- Cover the dishThe hinge of the recipe. If the pudding dish is left uncovered, condensation drips onto the batter and the crust turns to paste. Butter a sheet of foil or parchment, lay it loosely over the top, and tie or crimp it in place.
- Ninety minutes is realSteam is a gentle heat and the batter is thick, so the long time is not an error. Test with a skewer through the crust; it should come out clean and the apples should be collapsing beneath.
- Lemon sauceOne common version of the period is a cornstarch sauce: about 1 cup water thickened with 1 tablespoon cornstarch, sweetened with 1/2 cup sugar, then finished off the heat with 2 tablespoons butter and the juice and grated rind of a lemon. Serve it hot over the pudding. (Butter-and-egg creamed lemon sauces appear just as often in books of this date.)
- YieldA 2-quart dish serves six to eight. Leftovers reheat well covered, in a low oven or back over steam.
Lowney's book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to the large family of turn-of-the-century cookbooks issued by food firms to sell their product — hence the heavy chocolate representation elsewhere in the dessert chapter. This dumpling is not a chocolate recipe at all but a piece of plain household cookery carried along to fill out the section. The name is looser than it looks: "apple dumpling" could cover both apples individually wrapped in pastry and, as here, fruit under a single blanket of dough, closer to what a modern cook would call a cobbler or a steamed pudding. Steaming rather than baking was a long-established method, workable on a stovetop when the oven was not already hot, and it accounts for the soft, cake-like crust and the accompanying lemon sauce, which supplies the sharpness and gloss a browned crust would otherwise give.