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Dumplings (C flour t baking powder Pinch)
2 C flour 3 t baking powder Pinch salt Drop by spoon in boiling liquid (chicken or meat broth). Boil 20 minutes with kettle covered. 1 C flour Pinch salt Mrs. Geo. Smith.
A church-supper shorthand recipe that assumes the cook already knows how dumplings go together. The printed text has collapsed two versions of the same formula together, and neither one lists the liquid, so some reconstruction is needed before you start.
- The missing ingredientNo liquid is given, and 2 cups of flour with 3 teaspoons of baking powder will not drop from a spoon on its own. A standard drop dumpling of this era takes roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of milk (or broth) per 2 cups of flour, mixed to a thick, sticky batter that just holds its shape. The second, shorter list — 1 cup flour, pinch salt — appears to be a stray fragment of a smaller batch and can be ignored.
- Fat, or noneMany contemporary versions add 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter, lard or chicken fat rubbed into the flour, which gives a lighter, less bready dumpling. Mrs. Smith's omits it entirely, relying on the richness of the broth. Either is defensible; the fat-free version is noticeably chewier.
- The hinge: keep the lid onDumplings cook in the steam trapped above the liquid as much as in the liquid itself. Lifting the cover releases that steam and the tops sink and turn gummy. Set the lid on, leave it alone for the full time, and check only at the end.
- "Boiling" means a bare simmerA hard rolling boil batters drop dumplings apart and drives the broth up over them. Bring the pot to a boil, drop the spoonfuls onto the surface of the liquid or onto pieces of meat, then hold it at a steady simmer.
- Twenty minutes is longThat timing suits large spoonfuls in a deep covered kettle. Tablespoon-sized dumplings are cooked through in 12 to 15 minutes; test one with a skewer, which should come out clean and dry at the centre.
- Baking powder strengthThree teaspoons to 2 cups of flour works out at a teaspoon and a half per cup, at the upper end of the usual modern range. Cutting it to two teaspoons in total gives a less pronounced leavening flavour.
- YieldTwo cups of flour makes roughly 10 to 12 dumplings, enough to finish a pot of chicken or beef stew for four to six.
Drop dumplings are the plainest form of a very old idea: a stiff flour batter cooked in the steam over a stewing pot, stretching a small amount of meat to feed a full table. Older versions were leavened with saleratus and sour milk; the baking powder here suggests a date somewhere after commercial powders came on sale in the late 1850s and 1860s and grew cheap and reliable enough to displace the older acid-and-alkali pairings in home kitchens, though the recipe itself carries no date. Contributions like this one, signed with a husband's name in the fashion of the day, were written down for neighbours who had made them a hundred times and needed only the proportions, which is why the liquid, the mixing and the kind of stew underneath all go unmentioned.