Dumplings
1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon shortening cold water Sift flour, baking powder and salt into bowl; rub in shortening lightly with fingers; add enough water to make dough hold together. Drop by spoonfuls into stew.
Baked veal with Tomato Sauce 1 thin veal cutlet 1 teaspoon drippings 1 teaspoon onion 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1/2 cup bread crumbs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Trim off outer edge of cutlet and spread on board or platter. Fry onion in drippings until tender; add bread crumbs and parsley mixed with enough water to hold them together; beat thoroughly; spread on cutlet and roll; tie in three or four places. Dust with salt, pepper and flour. Place in pan; add 1/2 cup hot water; put into hot oven and roast 35 to 45 minutes, adding water if needed. Remove to hot platter; pour tomato sauce around and garnish with parsley.
Two short recipes share this page: a drop dumpling for stew and a stuffed veal roll. Both are written for a cook who already knows the shape of the dish, so the working details are left out.
- Keep the lid onDrop dumplings rise on steam, not on oven heat. Drop the spoonfuls onto simmering stew rather than into boiling liquid, cover the pot, and leave it covered for 12 to 15 minutes. Lifting the lid to look is the usual reason they come out dense and gluey in the middle.
- Baking powder quantityTwo teaspoons to one cup of flour reflects early single-acting powders. Modern double-acting baking powder is stronger; 1 1/2 teaspoons is ample and avoids the faintly metallic taste that a heavy hand leaves in a plain dough.
- ShorteningOne teaspoon is very little fat, which gives a firm, bready dumpling rather than a tender one. Lard, butter or vegetable shortening all work; a tablespoon makes a noticeably lighter dumpling if you want one.
- How much water, and yieldExpect roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of cold water for a dough that just holds together. This makes about six to eight dumplings, enough for a stew serving four.
- "Hot oven"In a book of this period a hot oven means somewhere around 400 to 450F. At that heat a thin rolled cutlet is done well before 45 minutes; start checking at 30 and cook to an internal temperature of 145F, resting a few minutes before slicing.
- DrippingsThe teaspoon of drippings is saved fat from earlier cooking, a standing item in a kitchen of this kind. Bacon fat, butter or oil substitutes directly.
- Onion and parsley measuresA teaspoon of onion means a teaspoon of it chopped, not a whole onion, and the same for the parsley. This is a modest stuffing for a single cutlet, which serves one or two.
- Rolling and tyingPound the cutlet thin between sheets of plastic before spreading the stuffing, or the roll will not close. Kitchen twine at three or four points is right; remove it before saucing and slice into rounds.
- Tomato sauceNone is given here, as the book assumes you will take it from another page. Any plain tomato sauce serves, spooned around the meat rather than over it so the floured surface stays crisp.
This page comes from a promotional cookbook issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the most widely distributed genres of American cookery print in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: recipes given away free, with the manufacturer's product written into the ingredient list by name. That explains why a stew dumpling of flour, salt and water is credited to a brand at all. The veal roll beside it is the older tradition of stretching one thin cutlet with a bread stuffing, a technique found across Europe, where stuffed-meat dishes such as the German Rouladen and the Italian involtini offer a loose parallel - the meat is the wrapper, the crumbs are the meal.