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Rolled Dumplings
1/2 cup suet 1 cup flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup cold water Chop the suet very fine; mix it with the flour and salt; then with a knife stir in the water, ice-cold. When thoroughly mixed roll the dough into tiny dumplings about the size of a marble; drop them into the soup; simmer for fifteen minutes and serve.
This page has come down to us damaged: the ingredient list is cut off at the top and a stray line from the following recipe has attached itself to the bottom. The method is intact and workable, but you will have to supply proportions.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the salt and water survive from the ingredient list. The flour and suet amounts are genuinely lost. Period suet doughs vary, running anywhere from about two to four parts flour to one of chopped suet, so any reconstruction is a guess: with 1/4 cup water and 1/2 teaspoon salt, something in the region of a cup of flour and a few ounces of suet will give a workable dough.
- Ignore the brown sugarThe "2 cups brown sugar" at the end belongs to whatever recipe followed on the leaf. It has no place in a savoury suet dumpling for soup.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, and it is what makes these dumplings light rather than dense. A butcher will grate or grind it for you; packaged shredded suet is sold in some shops. Cold unsalted butter, grated on the large holes of a box grater, is the usual substitute, though the texture is less airy.
- Everything coldThe instruction to use ice-cold water is the hinge. Suet must stay in solid flecks until the dumplings hit the hot liquid, where the fat melts and steams the dough open. Warm hands or warm water give you lead pellets.
- Stir with a knife, and stop earlyThe knife is not fussiness; it keeps the dough from being worked. Mix only until it holds together. Marble-sized means marble-sized; expect them to swell noticeably as they cook.
- Simmer, do not boilFifteen minutes at a bare simmer is right for dumplings this small. A rolling boil knocks them apart and clouds the soup. Keep the pot covered so the tops steam.
- YieldEnough small dumplings to garnish several bowls of clear beef or chicken soup; the exact count depends on how much flour you settle on, since the original quantity is lost.
Suet dumplings dropped into broth are old English and Scottish farmhouse cooking, a way of turning a thin soup into a meal with flour and the fat that came free with the joint. The very small size here — the "marble" dumpling, sometimes called a drop dumpling — is often said to have suited the garnishing of a clear soup at table, where a fist-sized dumpling would have been coarse.