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Baked Apple Dumpling
2 tablespoons butter teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup water 8 apples cored cinnamon and nutmeg Sift flour, baking powder and salt; work in lard and butter; when well mixed, add water. Cut paste in eight rounds, place apple in center of round, fill cavity with sugar and flavoring. Draw paste around apple; place in baking pan rough side down. Bake forty-five minutes. Serve with lemon or molasses sauce. 4 cup sugar 1/4 cup milk 2 eggs
The method here is a standard dumpling paste wrapped around whole cored apples, but the ingredient column has lost several of its numbers, so treat the quantities as a guide rather than a formula.
- Incomplete pastry listNo quantity of flour is given, and the lard called for in the method never appears among the ingredients. A workable dumpling paste of this era runs about 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 cup combined lard and butter, moistened with a scant 1/2 cup cold water. The 1/4 cup water in the original is too little to bring 2 cups of flour together.
- Oven temperatureNo oven heat is given; the instruction is simply to bake forty-five minutes. A moderate oven, in the region of 375F, is a reasonable modern equivalent, and forty-five minutes at that heat suits medium apples; test with a skewer through the pastry into the fruit, which should offer no resistance.
- "Rough side down"This is the hinge of the recipe. The gathered, pleated seam goes against the pan so the weight of the apple holds it shut. If the seam faces up it opens as the fruit softens and the sugar syrup runs out.
- Choice of appleUse a firm baking apple that holds its shape rather than one that collapses to sauce. The recipe says only that the apples are cored and does not say whether to peel them; left unpeeled the fruit holds together better, while peeled apples will soften faster and may need less time.
- LardLard was a usual shortening for pastry of this period and gives a flaky, tender paste; leaf lard in particular was prized for it. Modern all-vegetable shortening or additional butter both work, though butter alone makes a firmer crust.
- The saucesLemon sauce and molasses sauce would have been separate recipes elsewhere in the book. Sauces of this kind are generally thin and pourable, thickened with a little cornstarch or flour. Warm heavy cream or hard sauce serves the same purpose.
- YieldEight dumplings, one apple each. They are best the day they are baked; the pastry goes soggy on the underside overnight.
Baked apple dumplings belong to the older English tradition of boiled and baked puddings, in which whole fruit was enclosed in paste and often boiled in a cloth, and they arrived in American kitchens early enough to become a fixture of farm cooking, where cellared apples had to be used through the winter. What dates this particular version is the paste: baking powder had displaced the older suet and yeast-raised doughs by the end of the nineteenth century, giving a quick biscuit-type crust that could be mixed and wrapped in minutes. Lowney's was a chocolate company, and its cook book was published to put its cocoa and baking chocolate into American homes, but such books were expected to be complete household references, so plain fruit desserts like this sit alongside the chocolate work they were really there to sell.