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Dumplings (C flour t salt C sweet milk)
1 C flour ½ t salt 1/2 C sweet milk 1 egg beaten 1 t baking powder Sift dry ingredients. Add egg and milk.
Drop by spoonfuls into boiling broth. Cover tight and cook 20 minutes. Do not uncover while cooking. Always good. 1 egg 1/2 C sweet milk Julia L. Price.
A plain drop dumpling for the top of a stew or a pot of broth. The instruction that carries the whole recipe is the one about the lid.
- Do not lift the lidSteam trapped under a tight cover is what cooks the tops of the dumplings and makes them rise; uncovering drops the temperature and gives you dense, gluey centers. Use a heavy lid, and if yours is loose, lay a clean towel under it or a sheet of foil across the rim.
- The saltThe printed page reads half a teaspoon of salt, which is what our text now gives. That suits a cup of flour.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because many households of the period also kept sour milk or buttermilk on hand for soda batters. Whole milk is the closest match.
- The repeated line"1 egg 1/2 C sweet milk" appears twice; this is a printing artifact of the original page, not a second addition. Use one egg and half a cup of milk in total.
- Broth, not waterThese are meant to be dropped into simmering chicken or beef broth, or straight onto the surface of a stew where the liquid is bubbling but the meat sits below. Keep the liquid at a steady low boil rather than a hard rolling one, which tears the dough apart.
- Twenty minutes is rightUnlike many old timings, this one holds. Steamed dumplings this size need the full 20 minutes to cook through to the center; test one with a skewer, which should come out clean and dry.
- Sizing and yieldA spoonful of batter per dumpling; the count depends on the size of the spoon. They swell as they cook, so leave space between them in the pot.
Drop dumplings of this kind were the standard American answer to stretching a pot of broth or a small quantity of meat, and the batter is essentially a wet baking-powder biscuit. Their place here also marks a technological shift: chemical leaveners, which became cheap and reliable over the course of the nineteenth century, replaced the yeast-raised or suet dumplings of earlier English tradition and cut the work down to a single bowl. Cookbooks of this kind often printed each contributor's name beside her recipe, which is why Julia L. Price's endorsement, "Always good," stands in for any further instruction; the assumption was that the reader already knew what a dumpling should look like.