Home › Puddings And Sauces › Boiled Apple Dumplings
Boiled Apple Dumplings
Add to two cups sour milk one tea-spoon soda, and one of salt, half cup of butter, lard, flour enough to make dough a little stiffer than for biscuit; or make a good baking-powder crust; peel and core apples, roll out crust, place apples on dough, fill cavity of each with sugar, encase each apple in coating of the crust, press edges tight together, (it is nice to tie a cloth around each one), put into kettle of boiling water slightly salted, boil half an hour, taking care that the water covers the dumplings. They are also very nice steamed. To bake, make in same way, using a soft dough, place in a shallow pan, bake in a hot oven, and serve with cream and sugar, or place in a pan which is four or five inches deep (do not have the dumplings touch each other); then pour in hot water, just leaving top of dumplings uncovered. To a pan of four or five dumplings, add one tea-cup sugar and half a tea-cup butter; bake from half to three-quarters of an hour. If water cooks away too much, add more. Serve dumplings on platter and the liquid in sauce-boat for dressing. Fresh or canned peaches may be made in the same way.
Three methods in one entry — boiled, steamed and baked — built on a soda-and-sour-milk dough. The boiled version is the one that needs the most attention, since a dumpling dropped naked into water will shed its crust unless the seams are sealed properly.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Substitute buttermilk cup for cup, or add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or white vinegar to 2 cups of whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes.
- SodaOne teaspoon of baking soda to 2 cups of sour milk is a standard proportion; the acid neutralises it. If you use sweet milk instead, the dough may taste soapy — switch to the baking-powder crust the recipe offers as an alternative. The book gives no quantity for it, so use your usual biscuit proportion of baking powder to flour.
- "Half cup of butter, lard"Read this as half a cup of shortening total, butter and lard in whatever mix you like. The original punctuation is ambiguous, and a full cup of fat would make the dough too short to hold water out.
- Flour is unmeasured"A little stiffer than for biscuit" works out to roughly 4 to 5 cups for this quantity of liquid. Add it gradually; you want a dough that rolls without cracking and does not stick.
- Sealing for the boilThis is the hinge. Pinch the seams hard, then wrap each dumpling in a floured square of cheesecloth or muslin tied at the top — the period practice, and still the reliable one. Unwrapped dumplings in rolling water tend to split and the apple leaks.
- Half an hour is for soft applesHalf an hour suits soft apples -- Thirty minutes in gently boiling water will cook a Golden Delicious or a McIntosh through. A firmer apple such as a Granny Smith or Northern Spy may want closer to 45 minutes. Test with a skewer through the crust; the apple should offer no resistance.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a 'hot oven' of this period is usually read as roughly 400-450F. For the second baked method, where the dumplings sit in the sugar-and-butter liquid in a deep pan, a moderate oven of around 375F for the stated half to three-quarters of an hour should brown the top without boiling the liquid over.
- YieldOne apple per dumpling; the recipe refers to a pan of four or five for the deep-pan baked version, but does not say how many the dough quantity makes. Serve warm; the crust turns leaden once cold.
Boiled dumplings in a cloth are older than the ovens most American households could rely on — a pudding cloth turned any deep pot over any fire into baking equipment, and the technique came to the United States from English pudding cookery. By the time The Dixie Cook Book appeared in the 1880s the cookstove had largely won, which is why this entry reads as it does: the boiled method comes first, then steaming, then two baked versions, one of them producing the sugar-and-butter syrup that later cookbooks would simply call apple dumpling sauce. The sour-milk-and-soda dough is a marker of the same period, when soda was cheap and dependable. The closing line about canned peaches is worth noting too: home canning was well established by then, and a winter dumpling made from a jar of peaches was a real option rather than a novelty.