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Apple Dumplings
5 apples. 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder ½ teaspoonful salt 3/4 cupful milk Sugar
What survives here is the dumpling pastry: a plain baking-powder biscuit dough, which was the standard American wrapper for baked apple dumplings before short pastry took over. A few things in the list need translating before you scale or substitute.
- Crisco, and what it doesCrisco was new when this book appeared and is an all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening. Modern vegetable shortening behaves the same way; 4 tablespoons is a lean amount for 2 cups of flour, giving a tender biscuit rather than a flaky pastry. Butter can replace it measure for measure, but the dough will brown faster and taste less neutral.
- Cut in cold, mix fastThe hinge in any biscuit-type dumpling dough is keeping the fat in distinct pieces and handling the dough as little as possible once the milk goes in. Overworked dough turns tough and the dumpling shrinks away from the fruit.
- The salt figureOne and a half teaspoons of salt against 2 cups of flour is high for a sweet dumpling dough; comparable doughs of the period more often use something in the range of half to one teaspoon. The printed figure may well be a misprint for half a teaspoon, so treat it as unreliable and season by your own judgement.
- The sugarSugar is listed without an amount, and no method survives on this page; almost certainly it belongs to the filling rather than the dough. In dumplings of this kind apples are pared, cored, set on squares of rolled dough with sugar and often a little cinnamon or a knob of shortening in the hollow, then pinched shut.
- OvenThe original gives no oven direction. As modern guidance, baked apple dumplings of this type do well in a hot oven, around 400-425F, for roughly 35-45 minutes, until the crust is browned and a skewer meets no resistance in the apple. A slower oven tends to leave the pastry pale and soaked.
- YieldTwo cups of flour rolled thin will make roughly four to six squares large enough to enclose a small apple, so four to six dumplings. Firm, tart varieties hold their shape best; a soft eating apple collapses into sauce inside the crust.
- ServingThese were served warm with a thin sugar-and-butter sauce, hard sauce, or plain cream. If you want the syrup-poached style, the dumplings sit in a shallow dish with sweetened water poured around them and are basted as they bake.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to explain a genuinely unfamiliar product: a solid, shelf-stable cooking fat made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil, offered as a replacement for lard and butter in a kitchen that had used animal fat for everything. The recipes in it are deliberately ordinary American home cooking, chosen so a cook could see the new shortening doing work she already knew how to judge. Apple dumplings were an obvious choice: they were long-established in Anglo-American households, cheap, and built on exactly the kind of quick baking-powder dough that lives or dies on the behaviour of its fat. Fruit wrapped in dough and baked or boiled is much older than the pamphlet, and the American baked version is generally traced to Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic states, where apple orchards and a strong dumpling tradition met.