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Liver Dumplings
1 lb. beef liver 2 cups bread crumbs 1 tablespoon flour 1 egg 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 onion 2 tablespoons shortening Scrape liver, add crumbs, flour, egg, salt and pepper and mix well. Form into small balls and roll in flour. Drop balls into boiling water and boil 10 minutes. Brown the onion (sliced thin) in the shortening and pour over dumplings. Serve immediately. Serves 6.
A German-style liver dumpling, stripped down to the bare minimum for a sickroom kitchen. The hinge is the water: it must be barely trembling, not at a rolling boil, or the dumplings shed into the pot.
- Scraping the liver"Scrape" means laying the liver cut-side up and dragging the back of a knife across it to pull off pulp while leaving membrane and vessels behind. A food processor pulsed to a coarse puree does the same job in seconds, provided you first strip the outer membrane and any tubes.
- CrumbsTwo cups is a large amount against one pound of liver, and the book does not say whether the crumbs are dry or soft. Soft fresh crumbs are the right choice here; dry commercial crumbs at the same volume will give a dense, sandy dumpling. If the mixture will not hold a ball, hold back some of the crumbs rather than adding liquid.
- Simmer, do not boilSimmer rather than boil -- the book says to drop the balls into boiling water and boil 10 minutes, but a gentler hand is safer: bring the water to a boil, salt it, then drop the heat so the surface only shivers, since a hard rolling boil can knock small dumplings apart. Cook one test dumpling first and cut it open before committing the batch.
- DonenessTen minutes suits balls of about an inch. Anything walnut-sized or larger needs longer; the centre should be uniformly grey-brown with no red pulp. Liver is offal and benefits from being cooked through rather than left pink.
- ShorteningIn a book of this date, shortening means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat. Butter browns the onion better and tastes better over a plain dumpling, though it will need watching.
- OnionOne onion sliced thin in two tablespoons of fat wants ten to fifteen minutes over medium-low heat to go genuinely brown and sweet. Rushed onion is simply raw and sharp against the liver.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and an eighth of pepper is invalid-cookery restraint. For an ordinary table, marjoram, a scrape of lemon zest or a little parsley are the traditional additions and cost the dish nothing.
- ServingSix servings assumes the dumplings are one course of a light meal. They are usually served in clear beef broth, or drained with the onions and fat spooned over as written. They stiffen as they cool, so bring them to the table straight from the pot.
Liver dumplings are Leberknödel, a staple of Bavarian, Austrian and Bohemian cooking that travelled to America with German-speaking immigrants and settled into the plainer end of the domestic cookbook, usually floated in beef broth as Leberknödelsuppe. Their appearance under Invalid Cookery reflects a long-standing belief in liver as a restorative for the weak and the anaemic, an idea that pre-dates any understanding of iron or B12 but happened to be broadly right; liver was also cheap, which mattered when a household had to feed a convalescent separately from everyone else. Sections like this one were a fixture of general cookbooks well into the twentieth century, offering soft, mild, quickly digested dishes for people confined to bed at home rather than in hospital.