Home › Frozen Desserts › Drop Dumplings
Drop Dumplings
2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt. 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 scant cup milk Mix the flour, salt and baking powder; stir in the milk and drop the batter by spoonfuls into the boiling stew. Cover and cook for ten minutes.
If preferred, they may be dropped on a buttered plate and cooked in a steamer over boiling water. In either case they should be served immediately.
A fragment of a page, with the ingredients split above and below the method and the salt left unmeasured. The proportions as printed are worth thinking about before you commit them to a pot of stew.
- The list is incompleteOnly baking powder, milk, suet and flour are given quantities; the salt named in the method has none. Something in the range of a quarter to a half teaspoon per cup of flour would be in keeping with comparable recipes.
- Flour to milkOne cup flour to a scant cup milk gives a batter closer to pancake consistency than the soft drop dough dumplings need. Given that this is a fragment with the ingredients split around the method, the flour figure may be incomplete. Add flour until the batter holds its shape on the spoon.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to one cup of flour is well above modern practice, where one to one and a half teaspoons per cup is enough, and may leave a chemical aftertaste. Period baking powders were single-acting and varied between brands, which is part of why doses in older books look heavy.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, chopped or grated fine. Butchers will still supply it on request; shredded packaged suet works, and cold grated butter or shortening is the usual substitute. Keep it cold and in visible flecks rather than creaming it in.
- Do not lift the lidThis is the hinge. Dumplings dropped into stew cook in trapped steam as much as in liquid; ten minutes covered means covered for the whole ten. Opening the pot drops the temperature and gives you dense, gummy centres.
- The stew must be at a bare boilHeat of the stew -- The recipe says boiling; in practice a steady rather than a rolling boil is kinder to the batter before it sets. Drop the spoonfuls onto pieces of meat or vegetable where possible so they sit above the liquid, then cover.
- Steamer alternativeOn a buttered plate over boiling water they will likely take somewhat longer than the ten minutes given for the stew, since there is no direct contact with hot liquid; test rather than trust a fixed time.
- YieldAs written, roughly eight to ten dumplings, enough to top a stew for four. The instruction to serve immediately is worth following; standing in the pot they go heavy and soggy.
- Filed oddlyIf the section heading really places this among frozen desserts, it plainly does not belong there; the surviving fragment carries no heading of its own, so treat the placement as unresolved.
Suet dumplings dropped straight into a simmering stew belong to the older English tradition that came to American kitchens intact: fat, flour, liquid and a raising agent, cooked in steam over the meat so nothing was wasted and no second pan was dirtied. What dates this version is the baking powder. Boiled and steamed puddings were originally raised by long beating, by yeast, or not at all, and the chemical leaveners that reached ordinary households in the second half of the nineteenth century made a light dumpling possible in ten minutes rather than an hour. The heavy three-teaspoon dose reflects a period when brands varied widely in strength.