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Dumplings with Stews
Ten minutes before the stew is done, put half a pint of flour into a bowl, add Serve ½ teaspoon salt and a teaspoon baking powder; sift, and add sufficient milk just to moisten. Drop by spoonfuls on top of the stew; cover and cook 10 minutes without lifting the lid. Dish the dumplings around the edge of the platter, fill the stew into the centre, and serve. -Selected. 1 cup sugar
A bare-bones drop dumpling, measured by volume in the old way and cooked in the steam above a simmering stew. Two lines of the original are stray type from a neighbouring recipe.
- Do not lift the lidThe dumplings cook in trapped steam, not in the liquid. Every peek drops the temperature and gives you dense, gummy centres. Use a tight lid, or a lid with a cloth under it, and leave it alone for the full ten minutes.
- Half a pint of flourFlour was commonly measured by volume in this period. A half pint reads as one cup by American measure, roughly 4 to 4½ oz (about 125 g); by imperial measure it would be closer to 1¼ cups, so judge by the dough. On the one-cup reading the leavening works out to a teaspoon of baking powder per cup, which is standard.
- Sufficient milk to moistenAbout 6 to 7 tablespoons for one cup of flour. Aim for a soft, sticky drop batter that holds its shape on the spoon — too stiff and the dumplings stay leaden, too loose and they dissolve into the gravy.
- Baking powder has changedPeriod baking powder was often single-acting, so the batter had to go on the stew immediately. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but the instruction to mix ten minutes before serving is still the right one.
- The stew must be simmeringDrop the batter onto solid pieces of meat or vegetable standing above the liquid, and keep the pot at a steady simmer. A hard boil breaks the dumplings apart; a bare heat leaves them raw in the middle.
- Stray textThe words "Serve" in the first line and "1 cup sugar" at the end belong to adjacent entries in the printed book. Ignore both — there is no sugar in this dough.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; one cup of flour should make roughly six to eight dumplings, about enough for four alongside a stew. Double it for a large pot, but cook in a wide pan so the dumplings sit in a single layer.
Drop dumplings of this kind — flour, salt, chemical leavening and just enough liquid — are the plainest descendant of the suet and pastry dumplings of British cookery, adapted to North American kitchens once cheap baking powder made them a ten-minute proposition rather than an hour's boiling. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and much of its content was drawn from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives; what the marking "Selected" signified in the book's own system is not certain. Serving the dumplings ringed around the edge of a platter with the stew heaped in the centre reflects a platter-and-garnish style of presentation common at the time.