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Dumplin's
PLAIN DUMPLINGS 2 CUPS SIFTED FLOUR I TEASPOON SALT 3 TABLESPOONS BAKING POWDER 3/4 CUP MILK (ABOUT) Mix dry ingredients, and add milk, carefully working the dough as little as possible. It must be too thick to stir easily but not thick enough to roll. Have meat or vegetable stew, or cooked fruit, ready and boiling steadily. Drop dough by the heaping tablespoonful onto the surface of the boiling mixture, cover very tightly and keep boiling steadily, without removing cover, 15 minutes. Lift dumplings out gently, take up the rest of the dish, and eat at once.
Dumplings combine especially well with dried fruits, and the celebrated Pennsylvania Dutch dish, Snits and Knep (dried apples and dumplings) makes a whole outdoor meal.
A camp dumpling built on baking powder rather than yeast or eggs, cooked in the steam trapped above a boiling stew or fruit. Two things decide whether it works: the lid and the dough.
- Keep the lid onThe bottoms poach in liquid but the tops cook only in trapped steam. Lifting the cover to check lets the steam out and leaves you with raw, gluey crowns, so leave it sealed for the full 15 minutes.
- The baking powder looks highThree tablespoons is nine teaspoons for two cups of flour; usual guidance is around one to one and a half teaspoons per cup, so two to four teaspoons in all. At the quantity given the dumplings are likely to taste soapy or metallic. Treat the amount as suspect and scale down.
- Dough consistency"Too thick to stir easily but not thick enough to roll" is accurate: aim for a stiff drop batter that holds its shape on the spoon. Start with about half a cup of milk and add the rest by dribbles, since flour varies.
- Work it as little as possibleStir only until the flour disappears. Kneading or beating develops gluten and gives dense, rubbery dumplings instead of light ones.
- The liquid mattersYou need a thick stew or a syrupy fruit compote, deep enough to steam but not so thin that the dumplings sink and disintegrate. A thin broth will not support them; thicken it first.
- Steady boil, not a rolling oneSteady boil, not a violent one -- A hard, thrashing boil batters the dumplings apart at the edges. The recipe asks for the pot to be "boiling steadily" throughout; read that as a constant, even boil that keeps producing steam rather than a rolling one.
- YieldTwo cups of flour should give somewhere around 10 to 12 heaping-tablespoon dumplings, enough to top a stew for four to six. Leave space between them, as they swell considerably.
- Eat immediatelyThese collapse and turn heavy within minutes of leaving the steam. Serve straight from the pot; they do not reheat.
Baking-powder dumplings dropped onto a stew are a long-standing way of turning a pot of meat or fruit into a full meal without an oven, which fits the recipe's own note that Snits and Knep "makes a whole outdoor meal": a single covered pot over a fire does the whole job. The Pennsylvania Dutch dish named here, spelled Snits and Knep in this text and elsewhere as Schnitz un Knepp, pairs dried apple slices (Schnitz, from the German for cut pieces) with dumplings (Knepp, usually taken to be related to Knopf, button); it is commonly made with ham, is traditionally associated with German-speaking settlers in southeastern Pennsylvania, and still appears on church-supper tables there. Dried apples were a practical form of fruit for much of the year before home refrigeration, and they rehydrate into a thick, sweet-tart liquid well suited to steaming dumplings.