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Boiled Apple Dumplings
Make the plain short paste preceding. Pare and core good cooking apples; cut them in halves. Roll the paste to a sheet a quarter of an inch thick, put the apple under the edge, gather paste around and pinch it off underneath, and so on, till all the sheet is used up. See that there are no holes or thin places to let in the water. Drop the dumplings into broad saucepans of boiling water, shut down the lids; let them cook about half an hour, or till the apples leave the fork when tried. Short paste cannot be made any richer for these without breaking in the water.
A boiled pastry dumpling stands or falls on the seal: any thin spot or pinhole and water gets in, the paste turns to paste, and the apple escapes. Everything else here is straightforward.
- The hinge — a watertight sealGather the paste up over the apple half and pinch it closed underneath, then run your thumb over the whole surface feeling for thin patches. Patch any weak spot with a scrap of paste before it goes near the water.
- "Plain short paste"The paste referred to is the plain short crust given in the preceding recipe — flour, fat, salt and cold water; the proportions are not repeated here. The final sentence is a genuine constraint: a richer, higher-fat paste will slump and split in boiling water, so resist adding butter or an egg.
- Keep the water at a bare boilKeep the water moving but not violent -- The recipe calls for boiling water with the lids shut down. A hard rolling boil batters the dumplings against each other and the pan, so a steady rather than furious boil is easier on the seams. Give them room; crowded dumplings stick together and tear when separated — hence the "broad saucepans."
- Insurance for the nervousTying each dumpling loosely in a square of muslin or cheesecloth is a trick found in other boiled-pudding recipes, though not in this one. It holds the shape and keeps the seam closed if the pinch gives way.
- Choosing apples"Good cooking apples" means a variety that holds its shape — Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Anything that collapses to sauce, McIntosh in particular, will leave you with a bag of liquid.
- Timing and the fork testHalf an hour is right for halves of a medium apple. The test given is the reliable one: the fork should slide out of the apple cleanly through the pastry. Undercooked apple is worse here than slightly overcooked, since you cannot see inside.
- SweeteningThe recipe adds no sugar at all. If you want the apple sweetened, put a spoonful of sugar and a pinch of cinnamon into the cored hollow before closing the paste.
- Yield and servingServing -- Serve hot, split at the table, with hard sauce, cream, or a thin sweet lemon sauce — a boiled dumpling is bland by design and expects one.
Boiling a pudding or dumpling in water, rather than baking it, was the older English method and survived in American kitchens long after cookstoves made baking easy, often said to be because it needed no oven and no fuel discipline: a covered pot on the range would do. Apple dumplings in particular were a staple of Pennsylvania and mid-Atlantic tables, and are often served there with cream or a milk-and-sugar sauce. The instruction to use "broad saucepans" and to work along a whole sheet of paste until it is used up points to the book's audience — The American Pastry Cook was written by Jessup Whitehead for hotel, restaurant and boarding-house cooks in the late nineteenth century, people making four dozen dumplings rather than four. The closing warning about richer paste breaking in the water is the sort of note that comes from having watched it happen.