Home › Recipes › Baked Apple Dumplings
Baked Apple Dumplings
4 cups pastry flour. 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder I level teaspoon salt 2 heaping tablespoons lard or butter 1 cup milk Sift flour once, then measure, add baking powder and salt, sift three times, rub in lard with fork, and lastly add milk, toss on a well floured board and roll out a little less than a ½ inch thick. Cut dough in rounds large enough to enclose a small apple. Peel apples and core, place apple on dough, filling cavity of core with sugar, a dash of cinnamon and a small piece of butter, press dough over apple and bake in a moderate oven. 2 cups flour
A plain biscuit-dough dumpling from a baking powder company's promotional booklet. The ingredient list has been scrambled in the original setting — the 2 cups flour that belongs at the top ended up at the bottom — but the method is complete and sound.
- The full ingredient listRead it as 2 cups flour, 4 level teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 heaping tablespoons lard or butter, 1 cup milk. Plus an apple, sugar, cinnamon and a knob of butter for each dumpling.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is high by modern standards; a teaspoon per cup is the usual ratio now. Calumet was double-acting, and the booklet exists to sell it. Cutting to 2–3 teaspoons gives a less soapy crumb.
- Heaping tablespoonsTwo heaping tablespoons of solid fat is roughly 1/4 cup, perhaps a little more. This is a lean dough — closer to a biscuit than a pastry — and it will be soft rather than flaky.
- Moderate oven350–375F. At the lower end the apples cook through before the crust browns too hard; give them 40 to 50 minutes depending on size.
- Apple size and variety"A small apple" probably means something around 2 1/2 inches across, though the recipe gives no measurement. Use a firm baking apple -- Braeburn, Granny Smith, Northern Spy -- as softer supermarket varieties collapse inside the crust and flood it.
- SealingRoll the rounds thin, just under 1/2 inch, and press the seams firmly with damp fingers, seam side down on the pan. A split dumpling leaks all its syrup onto the sheet.
- PanThe original does not say what to bake them in. A shallow dish with sides works better than a flat sheet, and a few spoonfuls of water or cider poured around the dumplings partway through gives you a sauce.
- YieldProbably about six dumplings from this quantity of dough, more if the apples are small. Serve warm with cream or a hard sauce.
Reliable Recipes was one of a long line of booklets issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, founded in the late 1880s, which grew into one of the largest American baking powder brands before it was bought by the Postum Company in 1928 — Postum being renamed General Foods the following year. Booklets like this were distributed free or for the cost of postage, and the recipes specify the brand by name — a form of advertising that also, incidentally, helped accustom American cooks to baking by measured spoonfuls. The dumpling itself is much older than the company: apples baked whole in a wrapper of dough are recorded in English and colonial American cookery well before chemical leaveners existed, when the crust would have been suet paste or short pastry. What Calumet contributes is the substitution of a quick biscuit dough for that pastry.