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Chicken Pot Pie
Prepare chicken in usual manner and cut into pieces, cook until tender and season to taste. For dumplings, use 1 egg Little salt 2/3 C sweet milk 1 t baking powder to each cup of flour Mix as for biscuits. Drop by spoonfuls into boiling liquid and cook ten minutes or little more.
A church-supper standby written for cooks who already knew the dish: the chicken instructions amount to "do what you always do," and the dumpling formula is given as a ratio rather than a quantity. A few things need pinning down.
- The flour is left to youThe proportions are per cup of flour, but no total is given. Two cups of flour with 2 eggs, 1 1/3 cups milk and 2 teaspoons baking powder makes enough dumplings for a 4-5 lb chicken and feeds six; the milk quantity is generous, so expect a soft drop batter rather than a stiff dough.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which were equally common in a 1900s kitchen and would have needed soda instead of baking powder. Do not substitute buttermilk without adjusting the leavening.
- "Mix as for biscuits"Combine the dry ingredients, add the liquid, and stir only until it comes together. Overworking develops gluten and gives leaden dumplings. Note there is no shortening here, unlike a true biscuit dough, so the tenderness depends entirely on light handling and the baking powder.
- The hinge: keep the pot coveredDumplings cook by steam as much as by liquid. Once they are dropped in, put the lid on and leave it on for the full ten minutes. Lifting it collapses the steam and the centers stay gummy.
- Liquid at a gentle boil, not a rolling oneA hard boil batters drop dumplings apart. Bring the broth to a boil, drop the spoonfuls in a single uncrowded layer, then hold it just at a lively simmer.
- Cooking the chickenA stewing fowl of this period was typically an old laying hen and could take two hours or more to become tender. A supermarket chicken simmered whole or in pieces will be done in 45 minutes to an hour; take it to 165F at the thigh.
- Season and thicken the broth firstSeason the broth first -- "Season to taste" is the whole of the direction. Salt the broth firmly before the dumplings go in, since they absorb liquid and will taste flat otherwise. The recipe says nothing about thickening the broth.
- YieldA 4-5 lb chicken with the dumpling batter above should serve about six.
In much of the American Midwest, "pot pie" never meant pastry. It meant meat stewed in its own broth with dough cooked directly in the pot, the form the Pennsylvania Dutch called bot boi, in which the dough took the shape of flat rolled squares rather than drop dumplings; the Pennsylvania Dutch name is itself an adaptation of the English "pot pie" rather than the source of it. Drop dumplings of the kind used here are quicker and need no rolling out. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of church and society cookbooks of the period: contributors were writing for neighbors who already knew how to dress a fowl, and what was worth setting down in print was the one thing that varied from house to house, the dumpling proportions.