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NORFOLK DUMPLINGS (another way)
When bread is made at home, take a little of the dough just ready for the oven, make it up into small balls about the size of an orange, drop them into fast-boiling water, and when done enough, drain them, and serve immediately. Send melted butter, sweetened and flavoured with lemon-juice, to table with them. The dumplings should be torn apart with two forks when they are eaten, or they will be heavy. To ascertain if they are done enough, stick a fork quickly into them; if it comes out clear, they are sufficiently cooked. Time, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient, one pound of dough for about four people.
A boiled bread dough dumpling, and about as simple as cookery gets — which means the few details that are given all matter.
- The doughThis assumes risen bread dough at the point where it would otherwise go into the oven: a plain dough of flour, water, salt and yeast. A pound of shop-bought bread dough or pizza dough stands in for it; enriched or sweetened doughs are a poorer match.
- Size and yield"About the size of an orange" is roughly 4 oz / 110 g of dough, which would give four dumplings from the pound the recipe allows for four people, though the text only says "small balls" and does not state one apiece. Shape them lightly and do not knock all the gas out — a tight ball boils dense.
- The waterFast-boiling is specified and should be kept fast, with the pan large enough that the dumplings move freely. A gentle simmer lets them soak and go sodden.
- TimingA quarter of an hour is right for orange-sized balls; the fork test still works, though a skewer that comes out clean and dry is easier to read than a fork.
- Tearing, not cuttingThis is the hinge of the whole thing. A knife smears and compresses the crumb, and a Norfolk dumpling goes leaden the moment it is pressed. Two forks pulled apart keep the interior open and steamy. Serve within a minute or two of draining, as they deflate as they cool.
- The sauce"Melted butter" in a Victorian book usually means a flour-thickened butter sauce rather than plain drawn butter; here, sweetened and sharpened with lemon juice, it is essentially a sweet pudding sauce. Plain melted butter with sugar and lemon is a perfectly good reading.
- CostThreepence for about four people is a marker of how cheap this was — the dough was already being made for the day's baking, so little was added beyond fuel and butter.
Norfolk dumplings are an English boiled pudding of long standing, and unlike suet dumplings they contain no fat at all — bread dough, water, salt and yeast, dropped in boiling water. The version above is the household economy form: not a separate recipe so much as an extra use for dough already proving on baking day. They are often said to have been eaten before the meat course, with gravy, to blunt the appetite of a large family on a small joint, though this book gives the sweet treatment with buttered lemon sauce, which turns the same dumpling into a pudding. The instruction to tear rather than cut is generally treated as the defining rule of the dish. That a national dictionary of cookery bothers to record two methods may suggest how firmly regional English dumplings still held their place on the table when Cassell's was compiled.