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Dumplings with Roast Beef
Take beef out of dripping pan. Put in water to make about 2 quarts of gravy.
Wet about 2 tablespoons Five Roses flour and put in dripping pan. Take 2 eggs, ¾ 3/4 cup milk or water, pinch of salt, baking powder (1 teaspoon per cup of flour) and Five Roses enough to make a stiff batter.
Drop by spoonfuls in the gravy and boil 15 to 20 minutes, or till done. Arrange neatly around meat on platter. with plenty of gravy.
A drop-dumpling recipe that leans on the roasting pan for everything: the fat, the fond and the gravy the dumplings cook in. The quantities for flour are left to the cook's judgment, which is the one thing worth pinning down before starting.
- The hinge: simmer, do not boilSimmer rather than hard boil -- the recipe says "boil," but a rolling boil batters drop dumplings apart and drives off the gravy you need to cover them. A steady gentle simmer for the full 15 to 20 minutes is safer. Covering the pan so the steam cooks the tops is a modern habit; the recipe does not call for it.
- How much flourThe recipe never says. With 2 eggs and 3/4 cup liquid, a stiff drop batter takes roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of all-purpose flour, and therefore 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons baking powder at the stated rate of 1 teaspoon per cup. It should mound on the spoon, not pour.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-spring-wheat flour from the Lake of the Woods mill, close in strength to modern all-purpose or slightly stronger. Ordinary all-purpose works; mix only until combined, since gluten development makes the dumplings tough.
- The 2 tablespoons of wetted flourThis is a slurry, not a roux. Stir the flour into a little cold water until smooth before it goes into the hot pan, or it will seize into lumps. Two tablespoons will barely thicken 2 quarts of liquid, so expect a thin gravy by modern standards; 1/2 cup of flour would give a true sauce.
- Two quarts is a lot of gravyEnough that the dumplings can sit nearly submerged and still have room to swell as they absorb liquid. Use a pan wide and deep enough to hold them in a single layer. Whether the volume was chosen with that in mind is not stated.
- VesselA dripping pan sat beneath the roasting meat to catch the fat, whether before an open fire or in an oven. A modern roasting pan can go across two burners, but a wide Dutch oven with the pan juices scraped into it is easier to control and holds heat more evenly.
- SeasoningThe only salt mentioned is a pinch in the batter. Taste and season the gravy itself before the dumplings go in steam-cooked dough takes its flavor entirely from the liquid around it.
- Doneness and yieldDoneness -- split one: the centre should be dry and open-crumbed, not gluey. Yield depends entirely on how much flour you use and how large the spoonfuls are. Keep the beef warm while the dumplings cook; the recipe's first line says only to take it out of the pan.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its flour brand, and much of its contents came from Canadian housewives who sent recipes to the mill — loose in wording and confident that the reader already knew what a stiff batter looked like. This one belongs to the long British and northern-European tradition of cooking dough in the pot liquor rather than separately: suet dumplings in a stew, Pennsylvania Dutch potpie squares, spaetzle dropped into broth. Cooking them in the roasting-pan gravy is thrifty in a way the period took for granted — the fond and rendered fat left after a roast were treated as an ingredient, and the dumplings both stretched the meat and mopped up everything the pan had to give. The vagueness about flour quantity is typical of promotional cookbooks of the era, which assumed daily bread-making experience in the person holding the spoon.