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Baked Apple Dumplings
Roll a short pie crust thin and cut into squares just large enough to cover an apple. Choose apples of uniform size, pare, core and fill cavity with sugar, butter, a little ground cinnamon and nutmeg. Place an apple in the center of each square of pie crust, moisten the edges of the crust with white of egg and fold with the four corners meeting on the top. Bake until apples are tender, but do not allow them to lose their shape. Brush the top with egg and just before removing from oven dust with sugar. Serve with hard sauce.
A straightforward dumpling that depends almost entirely on choosing the right apple and getting the pastry sealed. The original assumes you know your oven and your fruit.
- Oven and timingThe original gives neither temperature nor time, only "bake until apples are tender." A workable modern approach is around 400F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then 350F for another 25-35 minutes. The apples are done when a skewer slides through the side with no resistance.
- Apple choice is the hinge"Do not allow them to lose their shape" rules out McIntosh and most modern eating apples, which collapse into sauce. Use a firm baking apple that holds its walls once the core is gone.
- Sizing the pastryFor a medium apple, roughly a 7-inch square rolled about 1/8 inch thick. Cut a template from paper for the first one rather than guessing; too small and the corners will not meet, too large and the base turns to paste.
- Filling amountsThe original gives none. About 2 teaspoons sugar, a scant teaspoon butter and a pinch each of cinnamon and nutmeg per apple fills a cored cavity without boiling over.
- SealingEgg white is used as glue rather than glaze here. Press the four seams firmly from the top down; a gap lets steam out and juice in, and the dumpling slumps.
- Short pie crust"Short" simply means a standard rich pastry, not a puff or a suet dough. One batch of pastry made with 2 cups flour will wrap four apples.
- Pan and juicesBake in a dish with sides. Butter and sugar are likely to leak from the base of at least one dumpling, and a flat sheet sends it onto the oven floor.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, often with a spoonful of brandy or vanilla, served cold and firm so it melts over the hot pastry. Make it ahead and chill it.
- YieldThe original gives no yield. One dumpling per person; four to six makes a convenient batch.
Apple dumplings belong to the older English tradition of enclosing whole fruit in dough, and they cross into American cookery early and thoroughly, appearing boiled in a cloth in eighteenth-century books before the baked version came to dominate. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and *The Delineator*, produced its cook book as part of a broader line of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its patterns; the tone here is brief, assuming competence, and offering no measurements where an experienced cook would not need them. The instruction to serve with hard sauce is often taken as an American touch, though the same butter-and-sugar sauce exists in English cookery as brandy butter, and it is chiefly the name that is American.