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Baked Peach Dumplings
Mix one teaspoonful each of cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda with one quart of flour; add a little salt, sift them together, and make into a paste, with a little milk and water. Sprinkle a little flour on the table, and roll the paste out several times, putting little pieces of lard on it to the amount of six ounces. Roll out thin the last time, and cut it into rounds with a biscuit-cutter. Put two or three pieces of canned peaches on each round, one teaspoonful of butter, and one tablespoonful of fine sugar. Draw the edges firmly together and place the dumplings on a large deep baking-dish, put them in a hot oven and bake quickly. When done, place them on a hot dish, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over, and serve.
A biscuit-style rough puff wrapped around canned peaches, baked hot and fast. The dough is the part that needs translating.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in bulk vessels: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 450 g of all-purpose. Scale down by quarters if you want fewer than a dozen dumplings.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis is baking powder made at the bench, a common practice in the decades when packaged powders were still new. Note the 1:1 ratio here; homemade powders were more often around two parts cream of tartar to one of soda. Two teaspoons of mixture per quart of flour is on the light side by modern standards; if you substitute commercial baking powder, about 4 teaspoons for 4 cups of flour is the usual rate.
- "A little milk and water"Unmeasured, as biscuit doughs often were. Expect roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of half milk, half water for a quart of flour, added until the dough just holds together and no further.
- The lard, and why it goes on in piecesSix ounces of lard dotted over the dough between rollings is a rough puff method, not a rubbed-in biscuit. Keep the fat cold and firm so it stays in flakes; if it smears into the flour the pastry turns short rather than layered. Chilled butter or shortening works in its place.
- A hot oven, baked quickly425-450F. Small filled pastries want that heat so the layers set and lift before the fruit juice soaks through; 18 to 25 minutes, until deep gold.
- Drain the peachesCanned peaches in heavy syrup will flood the dough. Drain them well and blot before filling, or the seams open in the oven. The recipe specifies a large deep baking-dish, which will at least contain anything that escapes.
- Sealing"Draw the edges firmly together" most likely means gathering the round up over the fruit like a purse and pinching it shut; setting it seam-side down and brushing the rim with water or milk will help it hold.
- YieldThe recipe does not give a cutter size, so the count is guesswork; a quart of flour makes a large batch, and you should expect well over a dozen dumplings depending on how big you cut the rounds. Serve warm; they are dull cold.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) is enormous and deliberately unglamorous in places, mixing hotel cookery with the plain American baking a household cook would recognize, and this is one of the plain entries. Two details place it in its period: the leavening is mixed from cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda rather than bought as baking powder, a habit that persisted well after commercial powders appeared; and the fruit is canned, called for without apology. Commercially canned peaches were cheap and everywhere by the 1890s, which made a summer dessert into a year-round one. Baked fruit dumplings themselves are much older and generally traced to English and Pennsylvania-German kitchens, where apples were wrapped whole in pastry and baked or boiled in a cloth; Oscar's version simply shrinks the idea to biscuit-cutter size and lets the tin do the peeling.