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Dumplings Cooked in Sauce
Make the dumplings like the last variety, but use the roll--pudding paste made with baking--powder as directed in the early part of this book, adding an egg to the mixing water for further precaution against breaking in boiling. Then boil the dump lings in their own sauce in the oven. This is effected by half filling two bright and clean baking pans with milk and water. When boiling drop in the dumplings and cook about half an hour with buttered paper over the top to prevent browning, and baste occasionally with the liquor, which will glaze them. Then put 1/2 pound of sugar and 1/4 of butter in each pan, and strain the sauce thus made after the dumplings have been removed to another pan. Peach dumplings are better this way than any other.
A hotel-kitchen method: fruit dumplings poached in the oven in milk and water, which then becomes their sauce. The instructions assume you already have the book's baking-powder roll-pudding paste and a fruit filling, so what follows is about handling the liquid.
- The hinge is the simmerA hard boil will split the dumplings. Get the milk and water to a boil, drop the dumplings in, and keep the liquid barely trembling rather than rolling for the half hour in the oven.
- Weights per panHalf a pound of sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; a quarter pound of butter is 8 tablespoons. That is generous trade-kitchen seasoning per pan, and worth scaling down proportionally for a small domestic batch.
- "Half filling" the pansThe pans are filled halfway with milk and water, so the dumplings are not submerged; the instruction to baste implies their tops stay exposed.
- Buttered paperParchment, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the dumplings, does the job. It keeps the tops from drying and browning while the milk glaze builds up.
- Choose the pan material"bright and clean" most likely points to scoured bright tinned metal. Stainless or enamelled steel is the modern equivalent; bare aluminium or unseasoned cast iron can discolour and pick up a metallic edge from milk and acidic fruit.
- The egg and the pasteModern double-acting baking powder behaves differently from the single-acting powders of the period, so a light hand is sensible. The egg is structural here, tightening the dough against breaking, and is best counted as part of the total mixing liquid rather than added on top of it.
- The sauceSugar and butter go into each pan at the end, and the sauce is strained once the dumplings have been lifted out, since it will hold dough crumbs and fruit shreds.
- PeachesThe recipe claims only that peach dumplings suit this method better than any other. Drained canned peaches will work but bring their own syrup, so cut the sugar in the sauce.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late-nineteenth-century American trade manuals written for men cooking in hotels and restaurant kitchens rather than for housekeepers, which is why the quantities are given by the pan and the paste is cross-referenced to an earlier page instead of repeated. Fruit dumplings themselves are older and thoroughly domestic: a suet or short paste wrapped around apples, peaches or berries and boiled in a cloth, a dish English and American cooks made through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What is being sold here is a workaround for that cloth. Boiling in water leaches flavour and risks a burst dumpling; oven-poaching in milk and water in an open pan lets the cook baste, glaze and watch the whole batch at once, and turns the cooking liquid into the sauce rather than throwing it out. The baking-powder paste marks the period as well, chemical leavening having come into wide use in commercial American pastry work alongside the older suet and yeast doughs.