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SAVOURY DUMPLINGS (another way.)
Mix half a pound each of bread-crumbs and flour, and a small tea-spoonful of baking-powder. Put in two or three ounces of fat bacon scraped, with a good seasoning of salt and pepper, a table-spoonful of chopped onion, and a table-spoonful of sage and parsley mixed. Make into a stiff paste with skimmed milk, form into convenient-sized dumplings, and boil for an hour or more, according to size. When served with boiled meat, these can be boiled with the meat. Probable cost, 8d.
A dense, savoury boiled dumpling of the plain English kind, built on breadcrumbs rather than suet. The recipe assumes a large pot already at work — ideally the one holding the boiled meat.
- The quantitiesHalf a pound each is 8 oz breadcrumbs (roughly 4 cups if fresh and loose, about 2 cups if dry) and 8 oz flour, near enough 1¾ cups. This makes a substantial batch; the recipe gives no yield, leaving the size and number of the dumplings to the cook.
- Scraped fat baconThis means raw fatty bacon or streaky belly scraped with a knife blade into a soft paste, so it disperses through the dry mix instead of sitting in lumps. Modern thin-sliced bacon will not scrape; use fatback, unsmoked belly, or finely minced fatty bacon, and work it in with the fingertips.
- Why skimmed milkSkimmed milk was the cheap by-product of butter-making in a period when it cost next to nothing, and the only fat specified here comes from the bacon. Whole milk or water both work; the dough should be stiff enough to hold a shape without cracking.
- The herbsA tablespoon of chopped sage and parsley together means fresh. If using dried, drop to about a teaspoon of sage and a teaspoon of parsley — dried sage is aggressive and will dominate the whole batch.
- The rising is deliberate lightThe rising is deliberately light -- One small teaspoonful of baking powder to a pound of dry ingredients gives a close, heavy crumb rather than a fluffy one, which appears to be the texture intended.
- Boiling timeAn hour is long by modern habit but correct here — these are dense and only cook through by slow, steady heat. Keep the water at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, which knocks them apart, and allow the full hour for anything larger than a golf ball.
- Cooking with the meatThe recipe offers this as an option: boiled alongside the meat, the dumplings take up the broth and season themselves. Make sure the pot has room, as they swell noticeably.
- CostEightpence for the batch — the flour and breadcrumbs do the work, the bacon supplies the flavour.
Boiled savoury dumplings of this type belong to a long English tradition of stretching a joint of meat with something starchy cooked in the same pot, of which the Norfolk dumpling is the best-known survivor. What distinguishes this version is the use of breadcrumbs in place of the more usual suet: stale bread was a household resource that no thrifty kitchen threw away. The sage, onion and bacon combination is the standard English seasoning for pork and poultry, and the recipe allows — though does not require — that the dumplings be cooked in the pot with boiled meat.