Home › Small Apple Dumplings › Small Apple Dumplings
Small Apple Dumplings
963. Pare the apples, scoop out the cores, fill up the space with moist sugar and lemon-peel. Boil them in cups with a thin paste round them; when done, pour custard upon them. Apples prepared in this way, with a thin paste round them and baked on flat tins, are excellent.
A Victorian shorthand recipe that assumes you already know how to make and handle a suet or short paste. The essentials are a firm cooking apple, a thin wrapping, and gentle steady cooking so the paste sets before the fruit collapses.
- "Boil them in cups"The cups appear to be stood in a pan of simmering water rather than the dumplings boiled loose, which makes this closer to steaming than boiling; a covered steamer over gentle heat does much the same job with less risk of water getting in. The original gives no instruction about covering the cups or the depth of water.
- Moist sugarNineteenth-century "moist sugar" is soft unrefined sugar, closest to today's light brown or light muscovado. Granulated white will work but gives a thinner, less caramel flavour.
- Lemon-peelPared zest only, no white pith, cut in fine shreds or grated. A strip laid whole in the cavity is easily removed before serving if you prefer the flavour without the texture.
- The paste"thin paste" would most likely be a suet crust or a plain short crust in a book of this date, rolled thin and wrapped round each apple; the original names neither the type of paste nor a thickness. Too thick and the centre stays raw; too thin and it splits as the apple softens.
- Choose the appleA firm cooking apple that holds its shape, such as Bramley for a soft fluffy interior or a russet-type dessert apple for a firmer one. Small apples will take roughly 40 minutes steamed depending on size; the original gives no time and says only "when done".
- The baked versionFor the flat-tin method, around 400F (200C) for 35-45 minutes is a reasonable modern equivalent; the original gives neither temperature nor time. Bake until the paste is browned and a skewer slides through the apple without resistance. Set them well apart so the sides crisp.
- The custardA pouring custard of egg yolks, sugar and milk or cream, cooked to about 175F (80C) and no hotter, or it will curdle. Ready-made pouring custard is a fair substitute and would not have been available to the original cook.
Apple dumplings were among the most common English puddings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cheap enough for a labourer's dinner and respectable enough for a family table when dressed with custard. The boiled version, wrapped in suet paste and cooked in a cloth or basin, belongs to the older tradition of pot cookery, where a single fire and a single pot had to produce the whole meal; the baked version noted at the end fits the spread of the closed kitchen range through the middle of the century, which made oven baking a more routine option. Cups and small basins were commonly used as moulds for individual boiled puddings. The terseness here is typical of a book written for cooks who needed the idea rather than the method.