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Plain Dumplings
1 teacup milk 1 egg (large) Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons butter 2 teaspoons baking powder Five Roses flour to make very stiff batter.
Beat well, and drop a spoonful at a time in boiling hot stew.
A stew topper rather than a boiled pudding: the batter cooks in the steam above the liquid, so the lid does most of the work. Two details in the original need translating before you start.
- The teacupA teacup in early twentieth-century recipes is usually taken as about 3/4 cup (6 fl oz) rather than the 8-oz measuring cup, though the term was never standardised. If you use a full cup of milk, expect to add proportionally more flour.
- How much flour"Very stiff batter" lands at about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of all-purpose flour with the smaller teacup of milk. It should hold its shape on the spoon and drop off in a lump rather than pour.
- ButterSoften or melt it and beat it in with the egg and milk; cold butter in a stiff batter leaves streaks that never disperse.
- Don't overbeat"Beat well" here most likely refers to combining the wet ingredients and distributing the baking powder. Once the flour is in, mix only until no dry patches remain -- Five Roses was milled from hard spring wheat and today's bread flour will toughen just as readily.
- The hinge: keep the lid onDrop the spoonfuls onto simmering stew, not into deep boiling liquid, then cover and leave the pot alone for 12 to 15 minutes. Lifting the lid drops the steam and the dumplings collapse.
- Heat level"Boiling hot" is best taken as a steady simmer with visible bubbles. A hard rolling boil breaks the dumplings apart before the crumb sets.
- DonenessA skewer into the centre of the largest one should come out clean and the underside should be set rather than pasty.
- YieldAbout eight to ten dumplings, enough for four servings alongside a stew for four to six.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of a large family of early twentieth-century flour-company cookbooks whose purpose was to sell the flour named on every page -- hence the instruction to add "Five Roses flour" rather than a stated quantity, and the assumption that the reader knows what a stiff batter feels like. Plain dumplings of this kind belong to the British and Irish tradition of stretching a stew with a cheap starch cooked in its own steam, but the version here is distinctly of its moment: suet has given way to butter, and the long-boiled or yeast-raised dough has been replaced by baking powder, the chemical leaven that reshaped North American home baking after the 1860s. The recipe's brevity is the point. A cook who needed to be told how much flour to use was not the customer these books were written for.