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Apple Dumplings
1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons shortening 1/2 cup milk 4 apples 4 tablespoons sugar 2 teaspoons butter Sift together flour, baking powder and salt; add shortening; rub in lightly; and add just enough milk to make a dough. Place on floured board and roll out 1/8 inch thick; divide into four parts; lay on each part an apple which has been washed, pared and cored; put one teaspoon sugar with 1/4 teaspoon butter in each apple; wet edges of dough with cold water and fold around apple, pressing tightly together. Place in pan, sprinkle with remainder of sugar and put 1/4 teaspoon butter on each dumpling; pour on remainder of milk. Bake 20 minutes in hot oven; remove cover and bake 15 minutes longer in moderate oven. Serve with hard sauce.
Peach dumplings may be made in the same way.
A biscuit-dough dumpling of the plainest kind, from a baking powder company's promotional book. Two details need attention before you start: the oven changes temperature partway through, and the milk is used twice.
- Split the milkThe half cup does double duty — part goes into the dough, the rest is poured into the pan as a basting liquid. Use roughly three tablespoons to bring the dough together and keep the balance back; add a splash more milk to the pan if the dough took it all.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives no figures. In books of this period a "hot oven" is generally taken as about 400-450F and a "moderate oven" about 350-375F. Start hot to set the pastry, then drop the heat for the apples.
- The coverThe recipe assumes a covered baking pan, though it never says so at the start. Cover the dish (a lid or foil) for the first 20 minutes so the apples steam, then uncover for the last 15.
- Apple size and timingThirty-five minutes will only cook a small apple through. Choose apples no larger than a tennis ball and a variety that holds together — Braeburn, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious — and test with a skewer through the pastry seam; a large apple may want another 10–15 minutes covered.
- ShorteningVegetable shortening or lard both work; butter also works, but keep it cold and rub it in quickly. The dough is a plain biscuit dough and toughens if worked.
- Rolling thinOne cup of flour rolled to 1/8 inch gives just enough to wrap four apples with little to spare. Roll on a well-floured board, cut four squares, and seal the gathered corners firmly at the top — wet edges alone will not hold if the pastry is dry.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce: butter creamed with about twice its weight in powdered sugar, flavored with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, chilled firm and served in a spoonful on the hot dumpling so it melts.
- YieldFour dumplings, one apiece, and they are substantial. For peaches, use firm freestone halves rather than whole fruit.
This comes from one of the cookbooks issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which spent decades distributing free recipe booklets in which its own product appeared in nearly every formula — an advertising strategy that shaped a great deal of American home baking, since the recipes were reliable and cost nothing. The dumpling itself is much older than chemical leavening: baked or boiled apple dumplings appear in English and American cookery well before the nineteenth century, originally wrapped in suet or short paste and often boiled in a cloth. What the baking powder era changed was the wrapper, replacing the long-worked pastry with a quick biscuit dough that could be mixed and rolled in minutes. Hard sauce, the traditional accompaniment, is a survival of the older British habit of serving spiced butter-and-sugar mixtures with steamed puddings, and it is the same sauce commonly served with Christmas pudding under the name brandy butter.