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Some Kitchen Kinks: Stew
A number of recipes for meat dishes made with dumplings and similar preparations follow: Meat Stew with Dumplings.
Stew. 5 pounds of a cheaper cut of beef. 4 cups of potatoes cut into small 2 pieces. 2/3 cup each of turnips and carrots cut into 12-inch cubes. 1/2 onion, chopped. 1/4 cup of flour.
Salt and pepper.
Cut the meat into small pieces, removing the fat; try out the fat and brown the meat in it. When well browned, cover with boiling water, boil for five minutes and then cook in a lower temperature until the meat is done. If tender, this will require about three hours on the stove or five hours in the fireless cooker. Add carrots, turnips, onions, pepper and salt during the last hour of cooking, APPENDIX and the potatoes fifteen minutes before serving. Thicken with the flour diluted with cold water. Serve with dumplings (see below). If this dish is made in the fireless cooker, the mixture must be reheated when the vegetables are put in. Such a stew may also be made of mutton. If veal or pork is used the vegetables may be omitted or simply a little onion used. Sometimes for variety the browning of the meat is dispensed with. When white meat, such as chicken, veal, or fresh pork, is used, the gravy is often made rich with cream or milk thickened with flour. The numerous minor additions which may be introduced give the great variety of such stews found in cookbooks.
Dumplings. 2 cups flour. 4 teaspoonfuls baking powder. 2/3 cup milk or a little more if needed. ½ teaspoonful salt. 2 teaspoonfuls butter.
Mix and sift the dry ingredients.
Work in the butter with the tips of fingers, add milk gradually, roll out to a thickness of one-half inch and cut with biscuit cutter. In some countries it is customary to season the dumplings themselves with herbs, etc., or to stuff them with bread crumbs fried in butter instead of depending upon the gravy to season them.
A good way to cook dumplings is to put them in a buttered steamer over a kettle of hot water. They should cook from twelve to fifteen minutes. If it is necessary to cook them with the stew, enough liquid should be removed so that they may be placed upon the meat and vegetables.
Sometimes the dough is baked and served as biscuits over which the stew is poured. If the stew is made with chicken or veal it is generally termed a fricassee.
A workmanlike braise from the era when a cheap cut and three hours of low heat were the default answer to dinner. Most of what needs translating here is equipment rather than ingredients.
- The hinge: keep it below a boilAfter the five-minute boil, the pot should sit at a bare simmer, around 200F, with the surface barely moving. A hard boil held for three hours tightens the muscle fibres and drives out moisture, leaving the meat stringy rather than tender. The book cooks on the stove throughout; if you would rather use a covered Dutch oven in a low oven, a moderate setting will hold the same gentle simmer with less watching.
- Fireless cookerAn insulated box in which a preheated pot finished cooking with no further fuel, common in American kitchens around 1900. A modern slow cooker on low is the closest equivalent, and the recipe's own warning applies: the contents must be brought back to a simmer on the stove when the vegetables go in, or they will sit for an hour in the danger zone without cooking.
- Vegetable cubesThe turnip and carrot measurement in the ingredient list has lost its fraction; '12-inch cubes' is nonsense as printed. Half-inch dice is the likeliest reading, and that size will be cooked through in the final hour of simmering.
- ProportionsTwo-thirds of a cup each of turnip and carrot is modest against five pounds of beef, and a cup or more of each would not be out of place. The half onion is likewise light, and a whole large onion browned with the meat does no harm.
- Trying out the fat"Try out" means render: chop the trimmed fat, set it over low heat until the liquid fat runs and the solids brown, then discard the solids. If your cut is lean, two tablespoons of any neutral oil serves the same purpose.
- ThickeningThe quarter cup of flour is slaked in cold water and stirred in at the end. Add it in a thin stream and let the stew return to a simmer for several minutes, or the sauce will taste of raw flour.
- DumplingsTwo cups of flour with four teaspoons of baking powder and only two-thirds of a cup of milk is a stiff biscuit dough, firm enough to roll and cut as directed. Steaming them over water for twelve to fifteen minutes, as suggested, is more reliable than dropping them in the pot, where they need the lid kept shut for the whole time to set the tops.
- YieldFive pounds of a cheap cut with vegetables and dumplings will feed eight generously.
Meat stew with dumplings is less a single dish than a template, and this entry says so outright: change the meat to veal or chicken and thicken the liquor with cream and the same pot becomes a fricassee, bake the dough separately and it becomes stew over biscuits. The interest here is the fireless cooker, an insulated wooden or metal chest packed with hay, felt or soapstone that held a preheated pot at cooking temperature for hours without fuel. On the evidence of its style, the page seems to belong to the American household manuals of the 1900s and 1910s, which promoted such devices as a saving in coal, in kitchen heat and in a cook's attention, and books of this sort routinely gave two sets of timings, one for the range and one for the box. The five-pound cheap cut and the three-hour simmer belong to the same economy: flavour extracted from connective tissue and time rather than from a tender joint.