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Drop Dumplings
2 cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Milk or water Sift baking powder, salt and flour thoroughly together, and add milk enough to make soft dough. Roll out an inch thick and cut in small circles. Roll each in flour and drop on top of simmering stew. Do not crowd them. Give them room to expand. Cover and boil for 20 minutes without opening pot.
A branded promotional recipe, printed with its flour quantity missing — the ingredient list starts mid-stream. A few notes before you commit it to a pot of stew.
- The missing flourNo flour amount is given, which looks like a printing lapse rather than a secret. A common ratio of the period is 2 level teaspoons of baking powder to 1 cup of flour, which would suggest about 1 cup here; roughly 1/2 cup milk should bring that to the soft dough described. Both figures are inference, not recovered text.
- Level teaspoonsThe insistence on "level" is deliberate. Spoon measures in earlier recipes were inconsistent, and levelled measurement was promoted in this period by cookery writers and by the baking powder trade alike. Measure flat.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder combining sodium aluminium sulphate with acid phosphate, meaning part of its lift is released by heat rather than by moisture alone. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes one for one; a single-acting powder will have given up much of its gas before the dumplings reach the steam.
- Roll or dropDespite the title, these are rolled and cut, not spooned. Rolling an inch thick and cutting rounds gives dumplings of even thickness that cook through in the same time. If you drop them from a spoon instead, keep them small and uniform.
- Simmer, not boilThe recipe says to drop them on simmering stew, then to "boil" for 20 minutes. Follow the first instruction. A hard boil batters the dumplings apart and drives liquid up over them; they should steam above the surface, barely moving.
- The lid is the hingeTwenty minutes covered, without opening. The dumplings cook in trapped steam, and lifting the lid drops the temperature enough to leave a dense, gummy centre. Test only at the end, with a skewer that comes out clean.
- Room to expandThey swell noticeably. Arrange them with a finger's width between rounds and leave some open liquid at the edges of the pot, or they will fuse into a single lid of dough.
- YieldIf the flour is indeed about a cup, expect a small batch, enough to accompany a stew rather than to form the body of the meal.
Reliable Recipes is an advertising cookbook, issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago and given away or sold cheaply to put the brand name into the hands of home cooks. That accounts for the phrasing here: not "baking powder" but "Calumet Baking Powder," specified by name in a recipe otherwise made of flour, salt and milk. Calumet was founded in the late 1880s and became one of the major American chemical-leavening brands, competing in a crowded and litigious market where firms fought over alum, phosphate and cream of tartar formulas. Dumplings dropped onto a stew are far older than any of it — a way of extending a small quantity of meat with cheap flour, cooked in the same pot over the same fire — and the baking-powder version belongs to a later chapter of that history, one in which booklets like this one played their part.