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Strawberry Dumplings
Make a paste the same as for rich baking powder biscuit, roll thin, cut about four inches square; place good strawberries in the center of each and draw the dough around them as for apple dumplings. Lay close together on a greased tin and steam for thirty minutes. Serve with a sauce made as follows: One tablespoonful of butter, onehalf cupful of powdered sugar; add as many crushed strawberries as you can beat in.
A steamed biscuit dumpling with an uncooked butter-and-berry sauce. The recipe assumes you already know the baking powder biscuit dough of the period, so most of the work is filling in the ratios and the steaming setup.
- The dough"Rich baking powder biscuit" of the period means roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, and a generous 4 to 6 tablespoons of butter or lard cut in, with about ¾ cup milk. Roll it about ¼ inch thick, thin enough to wrap without splitting.
- Steaming, not bakingThese go in a covered steamer over simmering water, not in the oven. A metal pie tin or perforated pan inside a large lidded pot on a rack works; the "greased tin" is there so the bottoms release. Keep the lid on for the full thirty minutes or the biscuit will be gummy in the middle.
- Why they sit close togetherThe recipe directs the dumplings to be laid close together on the tin. Packing them side by side helps them hold their shape as they steam.
- Sugar in the fillingThe original puts plain berries inside and all the sugar in the sauce. If your strawberries are tart, a teaspoon of sugar tucked in with each portion is in keeping and will not make them weep unduly.
- Powdered sugar means what it saysIn this period "powdered sugar" generally meant a fine-ground white sugar, close to but not identical with modern confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch. Modern confectioners' sugar works and gives a smoother sauce; superfine granulated gives a slightly grainier one.
- The sauceThis is a hard sauce — butter and sugar creamed until pale, then crushed berries beaten in until the mixture will take no more without breaking. It is served cold or barely soft against the hot dumplings, so make it first and keep it cool.
- YieldA four-inch square from 2 cups of flour gives about eight dumplings, enough for four to eight people served one or two apiece.
- Eat them the same daySteamed biscuit dough turns dense and damp within hours. These do not reheat well and do not keep.
Fruit dumplings — dough wrapped around whole fruit and boiled, steamed or baked — were a standard American way of stretching a small amount of fruit across a family table, and apple was the default, which is why this recipe simply says "as for apple dumplings" and trusts the reader to know. Strawberries are the luxury version: a brief, highly local crop before refrigerated rail freight extended and shifted the season, so a strawberry dumpling was a June dish and understood as such. The accompanying sauce belongs to the hard-sauce family, creamed butter and sugar served cold against something hot, which turns up all through nineteenth-century American and British cookery under names like brandy butter and Sterling sauce. Books of this era, aimed at housekeepers rather than professionals, seem often to have cross-referenced one recipe to another this way, assuming a shared repertoire that a modern reader has to reconstruct.