Apple Dumplings

In 1952 Robert L. Carver and his wife, Connie, gave up their home in Whittier, California, to move with their three daughters to Waverly, Iowa, where they planned to open a restaurant. They found a perfect location on the western edge of town at 1660 West Bremer Avenue, right at the intersection of U.S. Route 218 and State Highway 3, and in 1953 opened Carver’s Coffee Shop and Dining Room there.

Built in the style known today as midcentury modern, Carver’s looked as if it could have been imported directly from California. It was popular from the beginning, drawing customers from Minnesota and all over northeast Iowa who appreciated the attention Bob Carver lavished on the food he served there. By 1954 Carver’s was billing itself—with just a morsel of hyperbole—as “Iowa’s Finest Restaurant.”

In 1956 Carver decided to return to California to manage a chain of restaurants and supermarkets owned by F. Donald Nixon, the brother of Vice President Richard M. Nixon. (Carver would leave Nixon’s, Inc., a little over a year later to open Carver’s Coffee Shop in East Whittier.) The Carvers found a buyer for their Waverly restaurant in Robert L. Benck, who owned and operated a motel right next door. Benck announced his plans to keep the restaurant open seven days a week—it had been closed on Mondays—and to open earlier each day to accommodate customers in search of breakfast. The only thing Benck didn’t plan to change, he said, was the restaurant’s name, which by now was known simply as Carver’s.

For the most part the menu didn’t change, either. Top billing still went to Carver’s Deluxe Hamburger (“It’s love at first bite!”), but there was also a “Steak Night” every Saturday and a special turkey dinner every Sunday. And many customers would make a special trip just for a piece of Carver’s pecan pie.

In 1973 Carver’s Restaurant changed hands again when Otto Schnider, a Swiss-born restaurant manager who’d worked at the Des Moines Club in Des Moines, the Drake Hotel in Chicago, and the Pere Marquette Hotel in Peoria, bought it. For a while it became, confusingly, Otto Schnider’s Carver’s Restaurant, and then Otto’s Carver’s Restaurant. Schnider and his wife, Katie, introduced the Swiss Chateau Room, an “all-German smorgasbord,” multicourse “gourmet dinners” prepared by German-born chef Martin Vollmer on the last Tuesday of each month, and what was advertised as the “largest salad bar in northeast Iowa.”

In 1980 Carver’s changed hands once again when Larry Kussatz and his wife, Susan, became its new owners. Kussatz, a Waterloo native who’d previously been a music teacher at Waterloo Central High School, introduced “musical meals” served in a separate dining room by waiters and waitresses who doubled, between courses, as “Carver’s Singers.” And, for the Friday-night German buffet, there was Frank Lundak playing his “Yugoslavian Button Box”—a handmade five-row diatonic button accordion.

Carver’s 35-year run ended when the restaurant closed with little fanfare in 1987. It was replaced by a franchised Country Kitchen restaurant, part of a rapidly expanding chain of 250 or so outlets, most of them in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

Print Recipe

Apple Dumplings

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6

Carver's Restaurant in Waverly, Iowa, had an extensive dessert menu that featured a variety of cakes, pies, and ice cream sundaes, as well as these Apple Dumplings, which were a top attraction in the 1950s.

Ingredients

• 6 medium apples, peeled and cored
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/3 cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces, plus more for greasing the baking dish
• 1 cup pineapple juice
• Pie pastry (enough for 2 double-crust pies)
• 1 pint heavy cream

Instructions

1

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

2

In a small bowl, stir together the brown sugar, granulated sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and butter.

3

Using a melon baller, remove a tiny bit of the bottom end of each apple and then core each apple from the stem down, leaving about 3/4-inch intact at the bottom.

4

Toss the sugar mixture with the butter and stuff it evenly into the apples. Butter a large baking dish.

5

Wrap the apples in pie pastry and place in the prepared baking dish. Pour the pineapple juice over the dumplings. Transfer the baking dish to the preheated oven and bake at 425 degrees for 10 minutes; then lower the heat to 375 degrees, basting the dumplings with the pineapple juice in the baking dish. Continue basting the dumplings every 10 minutes for 30 minutes or until the apples are tender and the crust is deep golden brown.

6

Serve warm, topped with heavy cream.

Notes

The original recipe from Carver's Restaurant called for "sweetened pineapple juice," which is no longer widely available in the United States. Some other recipes for Apple Dumplings call for using an egg wash (1 large egg, lightly beaten) to seal the pie pastry as it is wrapped around the apples and to prevent it from slipping off during baking.