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Dumplings (Shortening size of hickory nut)
Shortening, size of hickory nut 1 t baking powder Mix shortening into flour, add salt and baking powder and enough milk to mix like biscuits. Drop by spoonfuls into boiling stews or pieplant sauce. Cook ten or twelve minutes. 1 egg Mrs. Thos. Corlett.
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe: the ingredient column has been scrambled in typesetting, so the flour is missing entirely and the egg has drifted to the bottom. Read it as a standard drop-biscuit dough thinned enough to spoon.
- Missing flourNo flour quantity is given anywhere in the original, so this cannot be reconstructed exactly. One teaspoon of baking powder would suit roughly a cup of flour, which is within the usual range for a biscuit dough.
- Shortening, size of a hickory nutA hickory nut meat is small — figure about 1 tablespoon of lard or vegetable shortening. It is rubbed into the flour as for biscuits, so keep it cold.
- The stray eggThe egg printed after the attribution is most likely a displaced line from this recipe's ingredient column, though it could belong to a neighbouring entry; the method never mentions it. If used, beat it into the milk and expect to need less milk than an eggless version.
- PieplantPieplant is rhubarb, and dumplings dropped into rhubarb sauce turn up as a cheap dessert in cookbooks of this kind. Use the stalks only; the leaves are high in oxalic acid and are not food.
- Keep the lid onCovering the pot -- The recipe does not say to cover, but dumplings dropped onto the simmering solids and then covered will steam through; repeatedly lifting the lid tends to leave the centres dense.
- Boiling means simmeringBoiling -- The recipe says boiling, but a steady gentle simmer will hold spooned dough together better than a hard rolling boil.
- DonenessThe recipe's ten to twelve minutes suits small spoonfuls; larger ones will need longer. A toothpick or knife tip should come out clean at the centre, not merely at the edge.
- YieldNot determinable, since no flour quantity survives; a batch made with a cup of flour would give roughly eight dumplings.
Community cookbooks like this one gathered recipes from neighbors, and the contributors wrote for neighbors who already knew how a biscuit dough behaved — which is why so many entries omit the flour, the pan size, or the oven altogether. The dumpling itself is doing double duty here: dropped into a meat stew it stretches a small amount of meat across more plates, and dropped into pieplant sauce it becomes dessert with no additional fuel or oven time. Rhubarb was the first thing to come up in a kitchen garden, well ahead of any tree fruit, which is reason enough for a dumpling to end up over stewed rhubarb in spring.