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Apple Dumplings, Hard Sauce
Prepare a pie paste. Roll it on a lightly floured table to the thickness of one-fifth inch. Cut out six pieces, each three inches square. Peel and core six small apples, lay each apple right side up on top of each piece of paste in the centre. Fill the hollow from which the core has been scooped with granulated sugar, mixed with half teaspoon ground cinnamon, then fold up the corners of the paste on top of each apple so as to entirely close them. Cut from the remaining paste six round pieces about one inch in diameter; arrange each piece on top of each apple. With a small pastry brush gently moisten the tops, edges and sides with a beaten egg. Lay them on a baking pan and set in a moderate oven to bake for thirty-five minutes. Remove, dress on a dish and serve with a hard sauce separately.
A straightforward baked dumpling, but the pastry dimensions as printed will not wrap an apple, and the hard sauce it calls for is left to the cook.
- The pastry squares are too smallA three-inch square cannot be folded over even a very small apple. Cut squares of six to seven inches for apples about 2.5 inches across, and judge by laying the apple on the pastry before cutting the rest.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Thirty-five minutes suits genuinely small, tender apples; larger ones need 45-50 minutes, and the test is a skewer sliding through the fruit, not the colour of the crust.
- Choose the apple for the jobA firm baking apple that holds shape rather than collapsing to sauce inside the pastry: Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Northern Spy. Softer eating apples will steam into mush before the paste is cooked through.
- Seal the seams properlyBrush the folded corners with egg or water and press them together. The little pastry round on top is decorative but also patches the point where the four corners meet, which is where sugar syrup escapes.
- Pie paste quantityThe recipe does not say. A double-crust pie's worth, roughly 2.5 cups flour to 1 cup fat, covers the squares as printed; if you cut the larger squares suggested above you will need appreciably more. Roll it thin as directed, a scant quarter inch, or the underside stays pale and doughy.
- Hard sauce is not givenA common proportion of the period is about 1 cup sifted confectioners' sugar creamed into 1/2 cup butter, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or a little sherry, then chilled firm. It is served cold in a separate dish and melts over the hot pastry.
- Catch the dripsLine the pan or use a rimmed sheet with parchment. Sugar and apple juice will leak from at least one dumpling and it welds itself to bare metal.
- YieldSix dumplings, one per person, as a substantial dessert.
Apple dumplings belong to the older English and American tradition of enclosing whole fruit in paste, which in earlier practice often meant boiling the parcel in a cloth rather than baking it. By the time this book appeared, the baked version was the ordinary one, and it survived in strength through the apple-growing regions of the northeastern United States and Pennsylvania, where dumplings were eaten with cream, milk or sauce and sometimes at breakfast. Hard sauce, the creamed butter-and-sugar accompaniment, is usually said to be so called because it is served firm rather than poured, and is a common partner in nineteenth-century English and American cookery for steamed and baked puddings alike; it is often traced to the brandy butter of the British Christmas table.