Felicity's Raspberry Dumplings

A dessert that's both fancy and humble!

Boiled desserts are something that fascinate me. They used to be as American as apple pie, but sometime after we broke free from Great Britain, puddings started losing their appeal, and now they're something of a novelty only, and most modern cooks - including me! - can be a little intimidated by them. 

There's plenty of reasons for that: they're heavy, take a fair amount of time to make, and the flavors and textures can be a hard sell to American audiences who aren't quite sure what to make of them. 

Today, I'm sharing my first ever attempt at a boiled dessert, straight from the recipe archives of Colonial Williamsburg. These interesting dumplings might have graced the table of anyone from Felicity to Governor Dunmore, and were definitely an interesting culinary experiment. Read on to see how it went!

This recipe was published on Colonial Williamsburg's food history blog History is Served. This blog doesn't appear to be updated all that often anymore, but it holds a special place in my heart because one of their recipes - for Sugar Cakes - was a source of inspiration that led to me creating A Peek into the Pantry! 

To Make Raspberry Dumplings is adapted from a recipe out of Hannah Glasse's 1796 cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. The original recipe is published alongside a modern adaptation, which includes detailed instructions. There's also a short video showing an interpreter making the dessert. 

I was excited to give this a try for another reason besides my curiosity about boiled desserts. The interpreter explains how this is a dish that would have been pretty accessible to anyone, as just about anyone in the colonial period could have stumbled across a patch of raspberries and decided to turn them into a dessert. The other ingredients are very straight forward as well: flour, a lot of butter, eggs and water, with a little sugar for dusting. Yes, it would probably have appeared more frequently on the table of a wealthy plantation owner like Grandfather, but a family living in more humble circumstances could have enjoyed something like this too. Food of the upperclass is generally what has been preserved in cookbooks and other sources in this period, so it's always fun to find a recipe that would have had a broader appeal in the time period. 

To get started, you need to make your pastry. Williamsburg advises making your own pastry from scratch, but notes you could use store bought pie dough if you'd rather. As I'm a glutton for punishment, I was excited to try making my own puff pastry following their instructions. 

I cut half a pound of butter into a pound of flour, working it with my hands until it was well incorporated, but also trying not to over do it so some butter would remain in nice chunks that translates to light, fluffy pastry. 

Next, I beat an egg and added half of it to a cup of cold water before adding it to the flour and butter. This was a part I was sort of estimating, because something about the HTML of the original recipe from Williamsburg is busted, so it's hard to tell exactly how much water they want you to use here. My dough came out looking fine once I rolled everything together, although it was a little wet. Dusting it with some flour solved that problem pretty quickly.

I rolled the dough out and cut up 4 ounces of butter into small pieces before layering them over the dough. I then folded the dough over this and rolled it out, then repeated the process with another 4 ounces of butter. The dough was reasonably easy to work with and felt pretty fluffy, although it did require some flour to get it on and off my granite counter-tops.

Roll the dough to be about 1/4 of an inch thick, and then spread on your raspberry jam. You could easily make this with any other jam or fruit spread you've got on hand if you don't like raspberries, although fair warning, this will require quite a lot of it to cover the whole pastry. I used a whole jar of fairly pricey jam, so just prepare yourself.

Now comes the difficult part: rolling it up without causing a giant mess. Once it's rolled, you're going to want to wrap it up in the cloth you're going to boil it in. The recipe recommends using an old bed sheet, but we didn't have any we were willing to sacrifice, so we used a dish towel we hoped we'd be able to get clean again. This was the hardest part of the recipe, as while rolling it up, my jam almost all slid out, and I had to wake Jess up from a pretty deep sleep to help me transfer my log of pastry into the tea towel. It was a lot bigger than I thought it would be, and it was extremely unwieldy to hold. I was genuinely worried I was going to rip the whole log in half if I didn't move fast enough. 

After getting it onto the towel, I rolled it up and tied it at the ends and in the middle with cooking twine. The recipe tells you to tie the ends very tightly, but keep the knots around the middle more gentle so you're not cutting through the pastry. 

You're going to need a good sized bit of cloth for this, as our dish towel almost didn't cover the whole pastry log. I'd also again recommend using something you're not that attached to, as the raspberry stains didn't come out of the dish towel as much as we would have liked them to.

Once it's all wrapped up, the dumpling tube needs to go in a large pot of "gently boiling" water, with enough water in it to cover the dumplings entirely. In the video, the interpreter uses a pot used for poaching fish, which is long and thin so you don't need to fold the dumpling in on itself. I didn't have something similar to this, so my dumpling got awkwardly bent in a circle to fit in my pot. Next time, I think I'd like to try making a few smaller logs to let them cook without doing yoga in the pan.

The dumplings cook for 45 minutes to an hour. Getting it out was again something of a challenge. The recipe instructs removing it from the pan with two tongs, but mine was so long and heavy that again I was worried about the pastry ripping into pieces as I fished it out. I ended up awkwardly dragging it out of the pan and putting it on a plate/cutting board to cool for 15 minutes.

Unwrapping it was... upsetting. The pastry stuck to my towel and ripped in pieces, and a lot of the jam fell out. Initially, I was really worried I'd ruined it, but Jess reassured me by poking around in the ends as I tried to clean up the mess and proving that it had actually cooked and the texture wasn't bad. It just also got stuck to our tea towel and tore a little. Jess wonders if I should have used more flour to dust on the tea towel to create a sort of barrier that would protect the dumpling as it unrolls.

The recipe asks you to slice the pastry into five equal cylinders, set them on a plate with the pinwheel facing up, and to drizzle butter and sugar over it before serving it. Plating in the colonial period was everything, and keeping dishes symmetrical and pretty turned your dinner from a simple family meal to a formal gathering. 

Well, that was never going to happen with ours, so I cut as nice a slice as I could manage and plated it. Didn't come out looking too bad, right?

One of the comments on Williamsburg's post about these dumplings is complaining that the texture is gluey and they don't understand what they're doing wrong. I genuinely have no idea why anyone would look at the instructions for this recipe and think they were going to wind up with anything that wasn't a little gluey and wet, because it boils in a pot of water for an hour before you get to eat it! So the texture might not be for everyone. 

However, I genuinely really liked it. Hot out of the pan, it was particularly tasty, although it was super, super rich. Slathering it in butter and sugar just made it more so, and while it tasted good going down, it made me feel super, super heavy and full after only eating a little bit of it. 

Initially, this really surprised me, because Williamsburg explains that this would be a dessert that was served after a heavy meat course to cleanse the palate and give you something lighter to enjoy, and this was anything but light! 

But then I realized I was being a total idiot, and went in with very different expectations for this dessert that I should have, making me no better than the folks who complained about how gluey it was. 

Now, I want to be clear on one thing: this really shouldn't be a summer dessert, and it's on me for being a stubborn idiot and making both Jess and I feel like bloated messes after eating this. Keeping the fire hot enough to boil the dumplings for an hour would have kept the kitchen absolutely sweltering in Virginia in August, and the pudding is absolutely not the sort of thing your body wants to be processing while you're already desperately trying to keep cool. Keeping the butter cool enough to roll out the pastry at the height of summer would also be a nightmare in a colonial kitchen, as you don't have air conditioning to help keep the room cool, and depending on your status, you probably wouldn't have a marble slab to roll it on either to help keep the temperature down. It also uses jam, which makes me think this would be a way of recapturing summertime flavors long after the world had gone into hibernation for the year. 

All that said! I did genuinely enjoy the end product and the process of making it. Next time, I'd want to make sure I had a large group of people to help me eat it, as we had a ton left over that now neither of us really wants to eat. I'd also probably divide my dough in half and make two logs to boil rather than twisting it in on itself, as that definitely didn't help my plating issues... and do it in winter. 

I also couldn't help but notice that my version came out a lot bigger than the one featured in the video from History is Served, which makes me wonder what on earth I did to my pastry to make it swell up so much. It tasted really good, genuinely pretty similar to a potsticker texture and flavor, but it got really big and fluffy in a way the others didn't seem to. 

Overall, despite some hiccups, I'm glad I gave this one a try! Hope you enjoyed seeing us try to bring some early American fare to life.

And I guess we need to think about buying a fish pan!