When: September 17
National Apple Dumpling Day celebrates the old-fashioned American dessert of whole or cored apples wrapped in pastry, spiced, and baked in a buttery caramel sauce. It's a dish that predates the apple pie, embedded in early American farmhouse cooking when apples were the most abundant fall fruit on the eastern seaboard.
Apple dumplings were listed in American cookbooks as early as 1796 — making them one of the oldest documented desserts in American culinary history.
The apple dumpling appears in America's first cookbook. Amelia Simmons' "American Cookery," published in 1796 as the first cookbook written by an American citizen and published in the United States, includes apple dumpling recipes. This is before apple pie had achieved its national-symbol status, before apples had become the symbolic American fruit. The dumpling was not a dessert — it was a practical preparation for a fruit that grew in enormous quantities in early American orchards and needed to be used. Apple orchards were among the first permanent plantings colonial settlers established, because apples were essential beyond eating: pressed into cider (safer to drink than water in an era of uncertain wells), fermented into hard cider (the standard alcoholic drink of the early republic), dried for winter storage, turned into vinegar for preservation, and cooked into every form from pie to sauce to the dumpling. The first hard cider in American history may predate the first American...