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Beef Stew with Dumplings
Use the flank ends cut from roast or steak, chuck, or a shin piece. There should be some bone and fat with the lean, as these give a richer flavor and the meat is more juicy than a clear, solid piece of lean. Two or three pounds of meat will make a stew for six or eight people.
Cut the meat in rather small pieces, and cut it from the bone; brown them in hot drippings, turning the pieces so they will brown on all sides. Put the meat in a good-sized stewpan with the bones and any remnants of cold roast or steak. Put in with it 2 small onions, 1 small carrot, scraped and diced or sliced very thin, and, if liked, 1 small turnip, peeled and diced. Cover with boiling water and cook slowly two hours or longer. Take out all the bones and the pieces of fat; skin the fat from the liquor, add salt, pepper, and a dash of paprika.
Have 6 or 8 medium-sized potatoes pared and soaked in cold water while the meat was cooking. Put these in and boil more rapidly than before. See that the water just comes to the top of the meat and potatoes. To make the dumplings, take 2 cupfuls of sifted flour; into one-half the flour rub a piece of butter the size of a walnut, into the other half sift 3 level teaspoonfuls of baking-powder; mix the two parts together, add a saltspoonful of salt, mix quickly with enough milk to make a rather soft dough, just stiff enough to hold in good shape when dropped from the spoon. Drop in balls from the spoon into the boiling stew, where they should rest on top of the potatoes, without sinking under the liquor.
Cover quickly and closely and boil rapidly fifteen minutes without lifting the cover. The dumplings should be put in when the potatoes are half cooked, so that both will be done at the same time. The dumplings should be light and fluffy and as easy of digestion as any hot bread. To dish, carefully remove the dumplings to a hot plate, put the meat and potatoes in a deep hot platter with the dumplings around them, and set in a hot oven. Add to the gravy in the stewpan 2 spoonfuls of tomato catsup, a little minced parsley, more salt if needed, and if it requires thickening, add a little rice or potato flour moistened with water; let it boil up until thick and pour over the meat. If there is too much gravy to serve in the dish with the meat, put the rest in a hot gravy tureen.
A conventional braise-and-drop-dumpling supper, written when a cook was expected to judge doneness by eye. The measurements that need translating are few, and the one rule that decides whether it works is the lid.
- Do not lift the coverThe dumplings cook in trapped steam sitting on the potatoes, not in the liquid. Opening the pan during the fifteen minutes drops the steam and leaves them dense and gummy in the centre; a glass lid or simple patience is the whole technique.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 ounce, or 2 tablespoons. A saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon.
- The two-part flour trickRubbing fat into half the flour and sifting baking powder into the other half distributed the leavening evenly through the dough. Sifting the baking powder through all 2 cups at once with the salt gives much the same result.
- Cut of meatChuck or shin is still right, and the bone matters — it is where the body of the gravy comes from. Flank ends trimmed from a roast are no longer a normal butcher's offering; ask for beef shin cut across the bone, or add a piece of marrow bone to boneless chuck.
- Simmer, not boil"Cook slowly two hours" means bare bubbles at the surface, roughly 180-195F. Chuck and shin toughen if the liquid rolls; two and a half to three hours does no harm.
- Soaking the potatoesParing potatoes ahead and holding them in cold water keeps them from browning. It also rinses off some surface starch.
- Hot oven for holdingThe platter is only being kept warm while the gravy finishes. Use 200F; a period "hot oven" was nearer 400-450F and will dry the meat and crust the dumplings.
- ThickeningRice or potato flour slaked in cold water thickens quickly and stays fairly clear; it will thin again if boiled hard for long, so bring it up once and stop. A flour-and-butter roux needs a few minutes' cooking instead.
- YieldSix to eight, as stated, from 2-3 lb of meat. The 2 cups of flour make somewhere around ten or a dozen dumplings depending on the size of the spoonful; double it if the table is hungry, and cook them in two batches so they have room to swell.