Apple Dumplings

Among the most beloved foods of colonial and early America, apple dumplings are also among the hardest to enjoy today, because the circumstances that made them to popular cannot be recreated. The idea of wrapping cored small apples in dough and boiling them is likely quite ancient in the British Isles. Apple dumplings are mentioned by name in British printed books from the early seventeenth century. By 1726, Nicholas Amherst was complaining that the presence of these dumplings at Oxford was an obstacle to scholarship: “ … nothing can be expected from only rot-gut small beer, and heavy apple-dumplings, but stupidity, sleepiness, and indolence.”