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Pot Pie
½ cup sweet milk 2 teaspoons baking powder Salt Five Roses flour to make stiff batter Drop from spoon into chicken gravy and boil 10 minutes.
This is not a pie at all but the dumpling topping for one — a drop batter cooked directly in simmering chicken gravy. The recipe assumes you already have a pot of stewed chicken going.
- The flour is left to youNo quantity is given for the flour; you are meant to add until the spoon stands a moment in the batter. In practice about 1 to 1¼ cups of all-purpose flour to the ½ cup milk gives a batter that drops in a lump rather than running.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because sour milk or buttermilk was equally common in the pantry and would call for soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian flour milled by the book's publisher, sold for general household baking. Modern all-purpose flour is a workable substitute; the stronger the flour, the tougher the dumpling.
- Salt and leaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder to roughly a cup of flour is a generous but not unusual proportion for the period. Figure about ½ teaspoon salt, since the gravy will season the outside only.
- Do not boil hard, and keep the lid onOn the boil -- The recipe says to boil, though a hard rolling boil will knock drop dumplings apart; a steady gentle boil is safer, and covering the pot (the recipe does not say to) helps the tops set rather than staying wet.
- Ten minutes is for small spoonfulsTen minutes suits small spoonfuls -- Tablespoon-sized drops should cook through in the 10 minutes given. Larger drops will need longer; splitting one open is the surest test, and the interior should be dry and even, not gluey.
- Enough gravy mattersThe dumplings swell considerably and absorb liquid. Have the chicken sitting in a good depth of gravy, well more than looks necessary, or you will finish with a dry pot and scorching on the bottom.
- YieldAbout eight to ten dumplings — enough to top a stewed chicken for four.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households, and many of its recipes were submitted by women who used the flour. That origin explains the terseness: the contributor knew what a stiff batter looked like and saw no need to weigh anything. "Pot pie" in North American usage of the period covered a range of things cooked in a pot with a starch on top — sometimes rolled pastry, sometimes squares of noodle dough, sometimes drop dumplings as here — rather than the enclosed baked pastry the phrase now suggests.