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Boiled Apple Dumplings
Pare some large apples, cut them into quarters, and take out the cores. Take a piece of crust made from good puff paste, and roll it out to sufficient size to cover an apple, roll the crust around the apple and make into a ball. Dip a clean cloth into a pot of boiling water and shake flour over it. Tie each dumpling separately and drop it into the boiling water. If the crust is sufficiently light and the apples not too large, half an hour will be long enough to boil them; but if very large, the apples will require nearly an hour. Serve with fresh butter and sugar, or the butter and sugar may be melted together, making a sauce, with a little essence of lemon added, to flavor.
A boiled pudding-cloth dumpling, which behaves nothing like a baked one. The cloth is the whole technique, and getting it wet, floured and tight is what keeps the paste from dissolving into the pot.
- The hinge: scald and flour the clothDip the cloth in the boiling water, wring it out, and dust it generously with flour while still damp. That flour hydrates into a thin seal on the inside of the cloth; a dry cloth or an unfloured one lets water into the paste and you will lift out a bag of apple soup. Use unbleached cotton or well-washed muslin, about 12 inches square per dumpling, and tie with kitchen string leaving a little slack for expansion.
- Puff paste is optional hereOscar calls for puff paste, but the lamination is largely wasted in a boiled dumpling, where steam cannot crisp the layers. Suet crust was also common for boiled work in this period and holds up better; a plain shortcrust also works. If you do use puff, buy all-butter and expect a soft, sodden-tender crust rather than flakes.
- Water should shiver, not thrashKeep the pot at a bare simmer with the dumplings fully submerged, topping up with boiling water from a kettle as needed. A hard rolling boil batters the paste and can burst it. Cold water added mid-cook will make the crust heavy.
- Apple choice and sizeOne medium apple, roughly 6-7 oz, quartered and reassembled inside the paste, gives a dumpling that cooks through in the 30 minutes he allows. His 'very large' apples wanting nearly an hour would presumably be something over 12 oz, though he gives no weights. A firm cooking apple that holds shape is best; Bramley collapses to sauce, which some people prefer.
- Essence of lemonThat is lemon extract, sold today in the same small bottles. A quarter teaspoon in the butter-sugar sauce is plenty; more turns soapy. Fresh zest and a squeeze of juice is the better modern substitution.
- The sauceMelted together, this is hard sauce's loose cousin: roughly 4 tablespoons butter to 1/2 cup sugar for four dumplings, warmed until the sugar dissolves. Superfine sugar dissolves without grittiness; granulated will stay slightly sandy unless you add a spoonful of water.
- UnmoldingLift each dumpling out, let it drain a minute in the cloth, then untie and roll it out onto a warm plate rather than peeling the cloth off upward, which tears the crust.
- YieldOne dumpling per person. The recipe specifies no quantities; a batch of paste made with about 2 cups flour will cover four apples.
Boiled dumplings and puddings tied in a floured cloth were the workhorse of English kitchens from at least the seventeenth century, when the pudding cloth freed cooks from having to stuff a pudding into an animal's gut or bake it in a crust; the apple dumpling is the sweet, domestic end of that tradition, and it crossed to America early enough to become a fixture of New England and Pennsylvania cooking. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen was not all consommes and pressed duck: much of the volume is a compendium of plain Anglo-American home cooking gathered up alongside the hotel's restaurant repertoire. By 1896, when the book appeared, the dumpling was also commonly baked in a dish of syrup, which needs no cloth and no watching, and boiling is often said to have been losing ground by then, so that recipes like this one soon read as heirlooms rather than instructions.