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Rolled Apple Dumplings
Peel and chop fine tart apples, make a crust of one cup rich buttermilk, one tea-spoon soda, and flour enough to roll; roll half an inch thick, spread with the apple, sprinkle well with sugar and cinnamon, cut in strips two inches wide, roll up like jelly-cake, set up the rolls in a dripping-pan, putting a tea-spoon butter on each, put in a moderate oven, and baste them often with the juice.
A soda-biscuit dough rolled around chopped apple, in the style of a jelly roll and baked in a pan of syrup. The original assumes you know the pan will need liquid; that is the point on which the dish succeeds or fails.
- The juice you baste withThe instruction to "baste them often with the juice" presumes liquid in the pan, and chopped apple alone will not give enough. Pour about a cup of water with a half cup of sugar (or a light syrup) into the dripping-pan before baking, and spoon it over the rolls every ten minutes so the tops glaze rather than dry.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a 'moderate' oven is usually reckoned at roughly 350 to 375F. The rolls need something like 35 to 45 minutes, until the crust is set and browned and the apple gives no resistance to a skewer.
- Dripping-panA shallow roasting pan or a metal baking pan with sides at least two inches high. The rolls sit upright, cut side up, with a little space between them so the syrup circulates.
- Crust proportionsOne cup of buttermilk and one teaspoon of soda will take roughly two and a half to three cups of flour, worked to a soft dough that just holds together. This is a biscuit dough with no shortening in it, so handle it minimally and roll it out at once; the soda begins working the moment it meets the buttermilk.
- SodaNineteenth-century books often call this saleratus. Treat it as ordinary baking soda; the recipe says only one teaspoon, and period spoon measures were not necessarily level.
- ApplesTart firm cooking apples, chopped fine rather than sliced so the strips roll cleanly. Four to five medium apples is about right for this quantity of dough.
- Cutting and rollingRoll the dough into a rectangle a half inch thick, cover with apple, sugar and cinnamon, then cut the whole sheet into two-inch strips and roll each strip up from the short end. Stand each pinwheel cut side up in the pan and dot with the teaspoon of butter.
- YieldDepending on how large you roll the sheet, expect eight to twelve rolls, enough for six to eight. Serve warm with the pan syrup, or with a hard sauce or sweetened cream.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to a family of late nineteenth-century American compilations built from contributed household recipes, and this dumpling shows the Southern kitchen's habit of treating biscuit dough as an all-purpose pastry. Where an English apple dumpling wrapped whole fruit in suet crust, the American version leaned on the soda-and-buttermilk reaction that had swept through home baking after commercial saleratus became cheap and reliable in the mid 1800s: quick, fatless, and made without waiting on yeast. Rolling the dough like a jelly-cake rather than enclosing whole apples may have suited a busy kitchen, though the recipe does not say so: chopped fruit cooks faster and the strips can be cut to whatever number of eaters are at the table. The repeated basting, whatever its purpose, is left unexplained by the recipe itself.