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Egg, or Drop Dumplings
1 pound or quart of flour. 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. 3 yolks of eggs. Two thirds pint of water (largest coffee cup.) Little salt. Mix flour and powder together dry; drop the yolks in the middle, pour the water to them and beat up the batter with a spoon. Have ready a saucepan of water boiling; dip the spoon occasionally in melted fat; form egg-shaped dumplings with it and drop them in. Cook with the lid on about ten minutes. If there is room they will turn themselves over like fritters. Can also be steamed as well.
A plain flour-and-yolk batter dumpling of the German hotel kitchen, meant to be dropped into simmering water and served with anything that has gravy. Two things decide whether it works: the stiffness of the batter and the temperature of the water.
- The hinge: batter stiffnessThe batter should be thick enough to hold an egg shape on the spoon and slide off in one piece, not run. Add the water gradually and stop when you get there; too slack and the dumplings dissolve into cloudy shreds.
- Flour by weight, not by quart"1 pound or quart of flour" reflects a period rule of thumb. Weigh it: 1 lb, about 450 g, which is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups of modern all-purpose flour scooped and levelled.
- How much waterTwo thirds of a pint is about 10 1/2 fl oz by US measure and 13 fl oz by British; the "largest coffee cup" gloss does not settle it. Start with 1 cup, then work in more a spoonful at a time until the batter is stiff and glossy.
- Simmer, do not boil hardBring the pan to a boil, then drop the heat so the surface only trembles before the dumplings go in. A hard rolling boil can knock them apart. The recipe calls for the lid, though it does not say why; holding in heat and steam over the tops is the likely purpose.
- The greased spoonDipping the spoon in melted fat between dumplings is what lets the batter release cleanly. Any neutral fat or butter works, and a small bowl of it beside the pan is enough for the whole batch.
- Timing and donenessTen minutes suits dumplings the size of a soup spoon. Cut one open: it should be set and slightly springy throughout, with no wet seam in the middle. Noticeably larger ones will need a few minutes more.
- SteamingIf you steam them instead, set them on a greased perforated tray over simmering water, covered, for about the same time. They come out drier and firmer, which suits a thin gravy.
- YieldA large batch: on these quantities perhaps 20 to 24 dumplings, enough for six to eight as a side. It halves easily enough, though three yolks do not divide neatly.
- ServingThey are bland by design. Serve them straight from the water into a fricassee, goulash, or beef in gravy, or brown them afterwards in butter with fine crumbs.
Egg or drop dumplings are often associated with the German-American professional kitchen that shaped much of American hotel cookery in the late nineteenth century -- the same tradition generally credited with giving English-speaking cooks spätzle, Eierklöße and the habit of serving a starch boiled in water rather than baked, though the recipe itself does not establish its origin. The instruction that the dumplings "will turn themselves over like fritters" is the mark of a cook writing for other cooks: it tells you the batter is buoyant and correctly made without spelling out a test. Baking powder here is doing work that an older recipe would have got from long beating or from yeast. Recipes of this kind were rarely dishes in their own right -- they were the vehicle for gravy.