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Light Dumplings
2 EGGS, BEATEN LIGHT I TEASPOON SALT 2 CUPS FLOUR, SIFTED Mix milk with eggs. The secret of making light egg dumplings is in having eggs beaten as light as possible. Mix salt with flour and stir in slowly, using more flour, if necessary, to make a rather thick batter. Dip a doubled square of cheese cloth in boiling water, spread it over a bowl and dust the cloth well with flour. Pour batter in and tie, leaving enough room for dumpling to swell. Put into plenty of boiling water, and boil rapidly about 45 minutes, closely covered.
Serve with meat, and eat with the meat gravy poured over.
The trick is to have the dumpling done without its growing soggy. The advantage of this camp recipe is that it doesn't require the steamer in which dumplings are usually cooked in the home kitchen.
This is a single large cloth-boiled dumpling rather than a panful of little ones, and it behaves more like a savory suet pudding than a drop dumpling. A few details need translating before it will work over a camp fire or on a home range.
- The liquidThe method calls for milk mixed into the eggs, but no quantity is given in the ingredient list. Work toward the stated goal — a rather thick batter, thicker than pancake batter and just barely pourable — and add the milk a little at a time rather than guessing at a fixed amount.
- Beating the eggsThe lift here is entirely mechanical: no baking powder, no yeast. Beat the whole eggs until they are pale, well risen in volume and fall in a ribbon, which takes several minutes with a mixer, then stir the flour in slowly as the recipe directs rather than beating the air back out.
- The clothA doubled square of cheesecloth is on the thin side for a 45-minute boil; unbleached muslin or a proper pudding cloth holds up better. Scalding it and dusting it heavily with flour creates the skin that keeps water out — skimp on the flour and the outside turns to paste.
- Tying itLeave real slack, as the recipe directs, so the dumpling can swell, and tie the neck tightly against the batter itself so water cannot creep in at the gather. A loose tie can leave you with a waterlogged dumpling.
- The boilPlenty of water at a rolling boil, lid on, and topped up with more boiling water if the level drops. Adding cold water mid-cook stalls the cooking and is the fastest route to the sogginess the recipe warns about.
- DonenessAfter 45 minutes the dumpling should feel firm and springy through the cloth. Unwrap it at once — left tied in a cooling cloth it steams itself damp.
- Serving and yieldTwo eggs and two cups of flour give one large dumpling, enough to cut into wedges for several people alongside a pot roast or stewed fowl. Cut it in thick wedges and ladle gravy over, as the recipe directs.
Boiling a pudding or dumpling in a floured cloth is an old English kitchen habit that predates the pudding basin, and it persisted in American cooking in part because it needs no special vessel — a pot of water, a square of cloth and a length of string. That is the argument the recipe makes for itself: in camp there is no steamer, and the recipe says as much. Egg dumplings of this type resemble the German and Pennsylvania Dutch egg-batter dumplings served under gravy, where the eggs alone are expected to do the leavening.