Dumplings
2 cups flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder. ½ teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon Cottolene. 3/4 cup milk.
PROCESS: Sift together twice, flour, baking powder and salt, rub in Cottolene with tips of fingers. Add milk gradually, mixing it in with a knife. Drop from tip of spoon on top of meat, an inch apart; cover closely and steam twelve minutes.
A steamed drop dumpling meant to finish a pot of stewed meat already on the stove. Two things need addressing before you start: the flour quantity is missing from the text as printed, and Cottolene no longer exists.
- The missing flourThe ingredient list gives no flour measure, though the process calls for it. Four teaspoons of baking powder to 3/4 cup milk points to roughly 2 cups of flour by the proportions standard in books of this period; treat that as an inference, not the author's figure.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening sold heavily to American cooks from the 1890s onward. Substitute an equal amount of vegetable shortening, lard or cold butter. One teaspoon is a very small amount of fat for this much flour, which is why the milk does most of the binding.
- Baking powder strengthFour teaspoons is generous by modern standards. Many powders of the period were single-acting tartrate types that gave up their gas quickly; 2 to 3 teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder should give comparable lift, with less risk of a chemical aftertaste.
- The hinge: keep the lid onThe dumplings cook in trapped steam, not in liquid. Lifting the cover during the twelve minutes drops the temperature and the tops set damp and heavy. Set them on the meat and simmering gravy, cover tightly, and leave it alone.
- Liquid levelThe pot should be simmering with enough gravy to generate steam but not enough to submerge the dumplings. If they sit in the liquid they poach into a paste on the underside.
- Spacing and timingAn inch apart matters because they roughly double. Twelve minutes suits tablespoon-sized dumplings; larger ones need 15 to 18, and the test is a clean skewer through the centre.
- MixingCutting the milk in with a knife is deliberate — it keeps the gluten slack. Stop as soon as the dough holds together in a shaggy mass.
- YieldIf the flour is taken as about 2 cups, roughly 12 to 14 dumplings; the recipe itself gives no yield.
Drop dumplings steamed on top of a stew are one of the oldest economies in the English and American kitchen: they stretch a modest piece of meat into a full dinner and use the gravy already in the pot as the cooking medium. What dates this particular version is the Cottolene. Introduced by the N. K. Fairbank Company in the late nineteenth century as a cottonseed-oil substitute for lard, it was promoted through a stream of free and sponsored cookbooks — 52 Sunday Dinners among them — which is why a single teaspoon of a brand-name shortening turns up in a recipe that hardly needs fat at all.