Yeast-Dumplings
INGREDIENTS for dumplings for 6 to 8 persons. quartern of dough, boiling water. AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Make a very light dough as for bread, using to mix it, milk, instead of water; divide it into 7 or 8 dumplings; plunge them into boiling water, and boil them for 20 minutes. Serve the instant they are taken up, as they spoil directly, by falling and becoming heavy; and in eating them do not touch them with a knife, but tear YEAST, TO MAKE. them apart with two forks. They may be eaten with meat gravy, or cold butter and sugar; and if not convenient to make the dough at home, a little from the baker's answers as well, only it must be placed for a few minutes near the fire, in a basin with a cloth over it, to let it rise again before it is made into dumplings.
TIME. -20 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain boiled bread dough, and one of the few dishes in Beeton that is genuinely ruined by a minute's delay. Everything here turns on serving them the moment they leave the water.
- A quartern of doughA quartern was a quarter of a peck of flour, roughly 3 1/2 lb, plus the liquid to bring it to a dough — the makings of the standard quartern loaf of about 4 lb baked. That is a large batch; halve or quarter it unless you are actually feeding six to eight.
- Make it a bread dough"A very light dough as for bread" means a yeasted dough given a full first rise, mixed with milk rather than water for softness. About 1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast per pound of flour, or roughly three times that weight in fresh baker's yeast, gives the same result.
- Shop-bought doughBeeton's suggestion of buying raw dough from the baker still works with supermarket bread dough or a pizza dough. Her instruction to let it warm and rise again in a covered basin before shaping is the important part — cold, unproofed dough boils into a dense lump.
- Boiling, not simmeringA wide pan of water at a genuine rolling boil, plenty of it, and the dumplings dropped in without crowding. Twenty minutes is what the recipe gives for a quartern divided into seven or eight, so pieces of around 8 oz; larger ones need longer and are best tested by tearing one open.
- Why no knifeThe blade compresses the open, steamy crumb and it collapses. Two forks pull it apart without pressing, which is also why they must be served the instant they come out of the water.
- ServingMeat gravy makes them a savoury side to boiled beef or mutton; cold butter and sugar turns the same dumpling into a pudding. Beeton gives both.
- CostThe fourpence given is the price of the dough in the 1860s, not a useful figure now beyond showing this was among the cheapest dishes in the book.
Boiled and steamed yeast dough belonged to kitchens where fuel was scarce or where the bread oven was already committed: a pot of water over the fire could be had at any hour. Versions survive across northern Europe — the German Dampfnudel and Hefekloß are close relatives, steamed rather than baked — and in England the dish was long associated with Norfolk, where floater dumplings of risen bread dough were eaten with gravy before the meat, to blunt the appetite of the household before the expensive part of the meal arrived. Beeton's note that the dough may be fetched from the baker is a reminder that many urban households of the period bought their bread rather than baking it, and that raw dough could be had over the counter.