Home › Dumplings › Light Dumplings
Light Dumplings
Four eggs beaten very light. Add a pinch of salt, 6 tablespoons sweet milk or water, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 cup Five Roses flour, or enough to make a batter thick enough to drop from spoon.
A drop batter for boiled dumplings, meant to be spooned onto simmering soup or stew. The original assumes you know the rest of the method, so the notes below fill in what it leaves out.
- The hinge: don't let it boil hardDrop the batter onto a liquid at a bare simmer and cover at once, then leave the lid alone for 12-15 minutes. A rolling boil breaks the dumplings apart, and lifting the lid releases the steam that lifts them.
- Batter consistencyThe flour quantity is deliberately open-ended. Aim for a batter that holds its shape on the spoon and slides off reluctantly, roughly like very thick pancake batter; too loose and it disperses in the liquid.
- Beaten eggs, no leavening shortcutBeaten eggs and baking powder together -- "beaten very light" means whipped until pale and foamy, and that air contributes to the rise; the teaspoon of baking powder to a cup of flour is a full working dose in its own right. Either way, mix and cook without long delay.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk a period kitchen also kept on hand. Whole milk is the closest match; six tablespoons is three-eighths of a cup, or a quarter cup plus two tablespoons.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour, more absorbent than soft southern brands. Ordinary all-purpose flour works; the recipe's own "or enough to make a batter thick enough" is the real measure.
- Cook them on somethingThese are not baked or fried. They want a broth, a stewed chicken, or a pot of soup with enough surface area that the dumplings sit in a single layer without touching.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour, which is why nearly every recipe names the brand outright. Egg-raised drop dumplings of this kind belong to a long British and Irish tradition of stretching a pot of stew or soup with a starchy topping cooked in the steam above it, and the appearance of baking powder here marks the recipe as a modern one for its day: chemical leavening only became a standard pantry item in North American kitchens over the second half of the nineteenth century. This recipe also calls for well-beaten eggs. On the question of flour, it simply says "or enough."