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Apple Dumplings
1 1/2 cups flour 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 teaspoon butter 1/2 cup milk 6 apples Sift together thoroughly flour and baking powder. Work in butter with tips of fingers and add milk. Place on a floured board, pat and roll out to a little less than 1/½ inch in thickness. Peel apples, cut in halves. Cut dough into rounds large enough to enclose the apple halves. Place in a buttered steamer and cook over boiling water for 20 minutes. Sections of peaches may be used instead of apples.
A steamed biscuit-dough dumpling from a baking powder company's promotional booklet, where the ingredient list runs in whatever order the typesetter found it. Two numbers need attention before you start.
- The flour is listed last and looks wrongFour cups of pastry flour cannot be brought together with one teaspoon of butter and half a cup of milk; the milk is roughly a third of what a biscuit dough needs. It may be a misprint for 2 cups flour with 1/2 cup milk, or scale the milk up to about 1 1/4 cups if you want the full 4 cups, and expect to add a little more by feel.
- Leavening proportionTwo level teaspoons of baking powder is right for about 2 cups of flour, which is another sign the flour quantity is a misprint. Modern practice is 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup.
- "1/½ inch" is a typesetting garbleRoll the dough a little under 1/2 inch. Thicker than that and the centre stays raw where it wraps the fruit.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than all-purpose. Substitute all-purpose with about a tablespoon per cup replaced by cornstarch, or simply use all-purpose and handle the dough as little as possible.
- Butter quantityOne teaspoon of fat for this much flour gives a lean, bready dough rather than a flaky one. Two to three tablespoons cut into 2 cups of flour will give a richer result, and does no harm to the method.
- Twenty minutes is not enoughSteam only sets the dough in that time; raw apple halves need 30 to 40 minutes over hard-boiling water before they yield to a skewer. Use a firm cooking apple such as Granny Smith, keep the water at a full boil, and top it up so the pan does not run dry. Peach sections, being softer, will be done nearer the stated 20 minutes.
- Steamer setupAny perforated insert or folded-cloth arrangement over a covered pot works. Butter it well and leave space between the dumplings, since the dough swells.
- Yield and servingSix apples halved gives twelve dumplings, so six to eight servings. Steamed dumplings arrive pale and want a sauce: hard sauce, cream, or a thin sugar-and-butter syrup with nutmeg, in the manner of the period.
Reliable Recipes was one of the small promotional booklets issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago in the early twentieth century, and its purpose shows in the ingredient list, where the brand name appears in place of the plain words "baking powder." Booklets like this were given away with tins or mailed for a stamp. The dumpling itself is much older than the powder: apples enclosed in dough and boiled in a floured cloth were standard English and colonial fare long before, and the steamer here may be read as a tidier successor to the pudding cloth, though that is inference rather than something the page states. Substituting peaches is noted almost in passing.