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Apple Dumplings, Baked
INGREDIENTS for 8 dumplings.-8 apples, suet crust, sugar to taste. AVERAGE COST, 1d. each.
Pare and take out the cores of the apples with a scoop, and make a suet crust with 1lb. of flour to 6 oz. of suet; fill the cavities of the apples with sugar, then roll them in squares cut from the crust, taking care to join the paste nicely. When they are formed into round balls, put them on a tin and bake them for about 1/2 hour, or longer, should the apples be very large. When served, sift over them some pounded white sugar. These may be made richer by using puff-paste instead of suet-crust.
TIME.-From to hour, or longer.
SEASONABLE from August to March.
APPLE FRITTERS.
A plain baked dumpling: a whole cored apple, sugar in the cavity, wrapped in suet pastry. The original gives no oven temperature and the printed time has dropped a figure, so both need supplying.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated because the book assumes a coal range. Bake at 200C/400F so the pastry sets and colours before the apple collapses; a slack oven gives grey, sodden crust.
- The half hour is optimisticThe garbled "From to hour" probably read "from half to three-quarters of an hour," though the missing figures cannot be recovered with certainty. A medium apple in pastry wants 40-45 minutes; test by pushing a skewer through the crust into the fruit, which should give no resistance.
- Suet crust proportions1 lb flour to 6 oz suet is 450 g to 170 g, a little under 3:1, plus a teaspoon of baking powder and enough cold water to bind - roughly 250-300 ml. That quantity wraps eight apples.
- Suet itselfShredded beef suet is still sold in boxes and behaves as intended; vegetable suet works the same way. Do not substitute butter straight across, as suet crust depends on solid fat melting late and steaming the dough open.
- Choose a firm appleA cooking apple that fluffs to sauce, such as Bramley, can burst the pastry. A firm eating apple that holds shape - Braeburn, Granny Smith - keeps the dumpling round.
- Sealing the pasteThis is the hinge. Cut squares slightly larger than they look necessary, brush the edges with water, bring the four corners up over the top and pinch the seams flat, then invert so the joins sit underneath. Any gap lets sugar syrup escape and weld the dumpling to the tin.
- Pounded white sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar; use caster sugar, or icing sugar for a whiter finish. For the cavities, plain sugar is all the recipe asks for; a clove or a scrap of lemon zest is an optional addition.
- Yield and servingEight dumplings, one per person, hot with custard or cream. The stated cost of a penny each is Victorian and is a note on household economy rather than anything you can price today.
Baked apple dumplings belong to the older English tradition of boiled puddings brought indoors to the oven: the same suet crust that went into a cloth for a boiled dumpling was simply wrapped round fruit and set on a tin instead. Suet was the workhorse fat of the nineteenth-century kitchen, cheap, keeping well without refrigeration, and forgiving in hands with no time to make puff paste - and Mrs Beeton offers puff as the richer alternative at the end. The seasonal note, August to March, marks the real limits of the English apple year before cold storage and imports: from the first windfalls to the last of the loft-stored keepers. Priced at a penny apiece, the dish sat squarely in the book's project of costing every dish for a mistress running a household to a budget.