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Baked Apple Dumplings
These are made with a good short or tart crust. First pare the apples whole, and then cut out the core with a corer, filling up the cavity with sugar, butter and a little cinnamon or a clove. Cut some rounds of paste rather larger than the apples, and cover them leaving no openings. The dumplings should be baked in a pan, and the juice which will ooze out should be retained, as by adding butter and nutmeg it forms a capital sauce in which to serve them. Before the dumplings are quite done (they usually take about an hour in a quick oven), the tops should be moistened and a small quantity of sugar sprinkled over them to glaze. The dumplings are sometimes baked in a pan or deep baking-dish nearly full of a rich sauce, made of water, sugar and a good-sized lump of butter, together with a little cinnamon. They should be well covered with this syrup a little being poured over them before serving.
A straightforward whole-apple dumpling, written for cooks who already knew how to handle pastry. The details that need translating are the oven, the crust, and the fruit itself.
- "Quick oven"Generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. A full hour at that heat will scorch most modern pastry; start at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 375F for the remainder. Test the apple with a skewer through the top rather than trusting the clock.
- "Short or tart crust""tart crust" here most likely means pastry made for tarts (a sweetened, richer paste) rather than anything sour. Either that or a plain shortcrust will do; allow about 1 lb of pastry for six apples.
- Choosing applesYou want a firm cooking apple that holds its shape for an hour under a lid of pastry. Bramley collapses to sauce; Granny Smith, Braeburn or a russet-type baking apple keeps its walls. Uniform medium apples, around 6 oz each, cook evenly.
- The fillingRoughly a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of butter per apple fills the core cavity. A whole clove is potent in a single apple, so use one, not several.
- SealingThis is the hinge. Roll each round large enough to meet at the top with a good overlap, brush the joins with water, and pinch them properly. Any gap and the apple steams out its juice, the crust sits in liquid, and you lose the sauce.
- Catching the juiceBake in a pan just large enough to hold the dumplings without crowding, so the escaping syrup pools rather than spreading thin and burning. Whisk butter and a grating of nutmeg into the pan juices off the heat.
- The glazeMoisten the tops with water or a little milk and dust with caster sugar about ten minutes before the end; earlier than that and the sugar darkens past pleasant.
- The syrup variantFor the second method, a rich sauce of roughly 1 cup water, 1/2 cup sugar and 2 oz butter with a cinnamon stick will serve six. Baked this way the bottom crust softens into something closer to a pudding than a pastry, which is the point of it.
- YieldOne dumpling per person. They are best warm rather than hot, an hour or so out of the oven, with cream.
Apple dumplings were English long before they were American, and by the time Oscar Tschirky was writing they had been a staple of household cookery on both sides of the Atlantic for well over a century, the sort of dish that turns up in farmhouse manuscripts and hotel kitchens alike. The whole cored apple sealed in paste is a way of making one piece of fruit into a substantial course, and the apple corer it depends on was a common enough tool that Oscar does not bother to explain it. That this appears in a Waldorf-Astoria book is a reminder that the great hotel dining rooms of the 1890s served plain nursery puddings alongside the elaborate French cookery; a maitre d'hotel of Oscar's standing was expected to know both. The second method given here, baking the dumplings sitting in syrup, is generally traced to Pennsylvania and Mid-Atlantic practice, where dumplings are still served swimming rather than dry.