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Rice and Apple Dumplings
Prepare a pudding cloth less than one-fourth yard square for each dumpling. Have a small half pint basin at hand. Wring a cloth out of hot water, lay it over the basin and spread it with warm boiled rice half an inch thick. Put in the center quarters of pared sour apples. With the cloth work the rice over the fruit until it is covered smoothly. Then tie the cloth about it closely. Proceed in this way until all are made. Steam them half an hour. Serve with hard sauce or sugar and cream.
A late-Victorian steamed dumpling that uses cooked rice instead of pastry as the wrapper. The whole thing hinges on the rice being sticky and still warm, and on the cloth doing the shaping work.
- The rice must be warm and starchyCold rice will not adhere to itself and the casing splits in the steamer. Use a short- or medium-grain rice boiled soft in plenty of water (not rinsed, not fluffed dry), and line the cloth while it is still hot enough to be tacky.
- Pudding clothA square of unbleached muslin or a clean cotton handkerchief, about 8 inches on a side, is right for one dumpling. Wringing it out of hot water is not optional; a dry cloth pulls the rice apart when you unwrap. Some cooks also dust the damp cloth lightly with flour.
- "Small half pint basin"A 1-cup pudding basin or teacup, used only as a mould to hold the cloth open while you press the rice into it. The dumpling is not cooked in the basin.
- Tie loosely, not tightTying -- The recipe directs that the cloth be tied closely about the dumpling. Boiled rice barely swells further, though it does soften and settle. Gather the cloth and tie just above the dumpling with string.
- Sour applesA tart cooking variety: Bramley, Granny Smith, Rhode Island Greening. Modern sweet dessert apples give a flat, cloying result.
- Half an hour of steamingEnough for cut quarters of a soft cooking apple over steady boiling water in a covered steamer or a rack in a lidded pot. Firmer apples, or thick quarters from a large fruit, want closer to 40 minutes; test through the cloth with a skewer.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and confectioners' sugar, roughly 1 part butter to 2 parts sugar, flavoured with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg and chilled until firm. It is meant to melt over the hot dumpling.
- Yield and servingOne dumpling per person; the recipe scales by the number of cloths you own. Unwrap each onto a warm plate directly from the steamer, since the rice casing stiffens as it cools.
Rice standing in for suet pastry is a thrift move with a long history in English and American kitchens: the boiled cloth pudding was the standard sweet of the nineteenth-century range, and any binder that would hold shape in a cloth could be pressed into service. Rice was cheap, and it was sometimes recommended as a lighter, more digestible alternative to flour-and-suet crusts. Apple dumplings themselves are older than either version and generally traced to English farmhouse cookery, where a whole or quartered apple was wrapped, tied and dropped in the copper alongside the day's other boiling. Steaming keeps the rice from waterlogging in a way that direct boiling would not.