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Apple Dumplings, Boiled
INGREDIENTS for 6 dumplings.-6 apples, suet crust, sugar to taste. AVERAGE COST, 1½d. each.
Make the dumplings by the preceding recipe. Put them into floured cloths, tie them securely and place them in boiling water. Keep them boiling from to 1 hour; remove the cloths, and send them APPLE DUMPLINGS. hot and quickly to table. Dumplings boiled in knitted cloths have a very pretty appearance when they come to table, or they may be boiled without cloths.
TIME.-1 hour, or longer should the dumplings be very large.
SEASONABLE from August to March.
A boiled suet pudding in miniature: whole apples, each sealed in suet crust and simmered in a cloth. The text is a continuation of the preceding crust recipe, so a few things are assumed rather than stated.
- The suet crustBeeton's proportion is 5 to 6 oz of finely shredded beef suet to every lb of flour, with enough cold water to make a stiff, rollable paste — roughly 8 oz flour to 3 oz suet for six dumplings. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, works directly; grated frozen butter is a workable substitute but gives a shorter, less springy crust.
- Preparing the applesThe apples are peeled and cored whole, the cavity filled with sugar (a clove or a strip of lemon peel is traditional), and each is wrapped in a rolled round of crust with the joins pinched shut. Any gap lets water in and the dumpling collapses.
- The missing number"Keep them boiling from to 1 hour" has lost a figure in the printing; it most likely read three-quarters of an hour to 1 hour. For medium apples, an hour of steady simmering is right.
- The clothsSquares of clean cotton or unbleached calico, scalded, wrung out and dusted thickly with flour on the inside face. The flour sets into a thin skin that keeps the crust from waterlogging. Tie loosely enough to allow the suet to swell — a tight cloth gives a dense, sodden dumpling.
- Knitted clothsThe pretty appearance may be literal: an open knitted cloth can print its pattern into the cooked crust. Cheesecloth is too fine for any such effect but works perfectly well for the cooking.
- Keep the water at a boilThe pot should be at a full rolling boil when the dumplings go in and kept at a steady boil throughout, with enough water to cover them the whole time. Topping up must be done with boiling water; cold water stops the suet expanding and the crust turns heavy.
- An easier routeThe same dumplings steam successfully in a covered steamer or a colander over simmering water, allowing about 1¼ hours. No cloths are needed, and there is no risk of a leak.
- Send them quicklyThis is the instruction that matters. Boiled suet crust goes tough and greasy as it cools, so unwrap and plate the moment they leave the water. Serve with custard, cream or brown sugar.
- Cost and season1½d. each is the mid-Victorian price per dumpling. August to March is the English cooking-apple season before cold storage; a Bramley or other firm cooker still suits best, since eating apples slump to sauce inside the crust.
Boiled apple dumplings belong to the great family of English suet puddings that the pudding cloth made possible — once a floured cloth could hold a paste together in open water, households without a reliable oven could produce baked-pudding textures over a single fire. Whole apples in crust appear in English cookery books well before Beeton, and the dish was cheap enough to be a staple of farmhouse and cottage tables through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the story of George III marvelling at how the apple got inside the dumpling is a much-repeated anecdote rather than documented fact. Beeton's costing of 1½d. each is the point of the entry as much as the method: Household Management and its later abridgements were written for mistresses budgeting a servant-run kitchen, and a filling pudding at that price, made from flour, butcher's suet and orchard fruit in season, was exactly the sort of arithmetic her readers wanted.