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Baked Apple Dumplings
Pare and core large tart apples. Make a short pie-crust; roll thin and cut into squares large enough to cover an apple. Place one apple in the center of each square; fill the cavity with sugar, cinnamon and grated nutmeg; fold the corners to meet at the top, pinching the edges to make them stick together and hold in the juices. Bake until the apples are tender and serve with hard or wine sauce.
A complete dish given in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew pie pastry. The gaps worth filling are the oven, the timing and the pastry quantity.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 400F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the crust, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes until a skewer slides through the apple without resistance. A whole apple takes longer than most pastry likes, hence the two-stage heat.
- Pastry quantityA standard double-crust pie recipe (about 2 1/2 cups flour) rolled thin gives four to six squares of roughly 7 inches, depending on the size of your apples. Roll thinner than you would for a pie base; thick pastry on the underside will not cook through against the wet fruit.
- Choosing the apples"Large tart" points to a firm cooking apple that holds its shape rather than a soft eating apple. Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy or Rhode Island Greening all work. A soft eating apple will collapse into sauce inside its shell.
- Sealing is the hingeThe instruction to pinch the edges "to hold in the juices" is the whole trick. Brush the pastry edges with water or egg white before folding, press firmly, and set the dumplings a couple of inches apart on a rimmed pan. Any split seam empties the apple onto the tray and leaves you with a hollow crust.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and sifted confectioners' sugar, about 1/2 cup butter to 1 1/2 cups sugar, beaten pale and chilled firm, then flavoured with vanilla or brandy. It is served cold in a spoonful on the hot dumpling and melts into it.
- Wine sauceCommonly a thin cooked sauce: sugar and water, sometimes lightly thickened, simmered and finished off the heat with sherry, madeira or a sweet red wine. Serve it warm, poured around rather than over, so the pastry stays crisp.
- Filling the cavitySugar alone runs thin. A couple of teaspoons of sugar per apple with the spices, plus a small knob of butter, makes a syrup rather than a puddle.
- Yield and servingOne dumpling per person. They are best eaten within an hour of leaving the oven, while the crust is still short and the apple hot enough to melt the sauce.
Apple dumplings are a long-established form of English and American home baking, and the whole-apple-in-pastry version was long a standby of Pennsylvania and New England kitchens, where cellared apples had to be used up through the winter. Older versions were boiled in a floured cloth; baking them, as here, is the later and drier method that gives a browned crust. The pairing with hard sauce, essentially sweetened butter served cold, points to the same tradition that put hard sauce on plum pudding and mince pie, and a wine sauce is offered as an alternative.