Cinnamon
Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together. Work in Crisco with finger tips; add gradually milk, mixing with knife to a nice dough. Roll 1½ inch thick, cut into squares and lay in center of each an apple, pared and cored. Fill up centers with sugar and cinnamon and take corners off the dough and pinch together. Place in Criscoed baking pan, dot over with sugar and Crisco and bake in moderate oven for twenty-five minutes or till nicely browned. Serve hot with milk.
Sufficient for five dumplings. 1½ cupfuls flour
An apple dumpling in biscuit dough, printed here to show Crisco doing the work of lard in a short pastry. The ingredient list on the page is cut off after the flour, so some quantities have to be reconstructed from standard baking-powder biscuit proportions.
- Incomplete ingredient listOnly "1½ cupfuls flour" survives. For a dough of this type the usual period ratio is about 3 teaspoons baking powder and ½ teaspoon salt to that flour, 3 to 4 tablespoons shortening, and roughly ½ cup milk. Treat these as informed reconstruction, not as the book's own figures.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375°F by the usual period equivalents. Twenty-five minutes will brown the dough, but whole pared apples rarely cook through in that time; expect 40 to 50 minutes for a medium apple, and test with a skewer through the seam.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening of 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Current Crisco is a reformulated blend with no meaningful trans fat, and it behaves much the same way in this dough. Butter works but softens faster, so keep the dough cold.
- Roll 1½ inches thickAlmost certainly a misprint for ⅛ or ¼ inch. A dough an inch and a half thick could not be folded over an apple at all. Roll thin enough to bring the four corners together over the fruit.
- Choose a firm appleSomething that holds shape and has acid to spare — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy. A soft eating apple collapses inside the crust and floods it.
- Sealing"Take corners off the dough and pinch together" most likely means trimming the four corners of the square so the flaps meet cleanly, though it may equally mean drawing the corners up over the apple. Either way, pinch the seams hard. A dab of milk on the edges helps them hold; an unsealed dumpling leaks syrup and welds itself to the pan.
- Yield and servingFive dumplings, one apiece. "Serve hot with milk" is literal: cold whole milk or thin cream poured over at the table, a common accompaniment for a baked pudding of this kind. Cream or a hard sauce is a fair substitute.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's recipe book for a product they had introduced in 1911, and its purpose was to teach cooks that a solid white vegetable fat could stand in for lard and butter in everything they already made. Apple dumplings were an obvious demonstration piece: a plain baking-powder dough wrapped round a whole apple, long standard in American and British household cookery, and entirely dependent on how the fat is cut into the flour. Note the verb "Criscoed" applied to the baking pan — the book works hard to make the brand into a word cooks would use without thinking, as the Hoover brand name later became a verb in British English. Serving a hot baked pudding with plain milk poured over, rather than a cooked sauce, suggests an everyday family recipe rather than a company-dinner one.