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Beef Stew with Dumplings
Turnip } 2/3 cup each, cut in. Carrot } half-inch cubes. Salt. Aitchbone, weighing 5 lbs. 4 cups potatoes, cut in ¼ inch slices Turnip cup each, cut in half-inch cubes } Carrot S 1/2 small onion, cut in thin slices 1/4 cup flour
The page as printed is a scanned ingredient list with the method and the dumpling batter lost; several quantities have been mangled in transcription. What follows fills in the cut, the units and the technique the original assumed its reader already knew.
- AitchboneThe aitchbone is the pelvic bone at the top of the round, sold in older butchery as a bone-in rump roast; it was also written "edge bone". It is rarely labelled that way on a supermarket counter today; use 4-5 lb of bone-in chuck, shin or beef shank, cut into 2-inch pieces with the bone kept in the pot for body.
- MeasurementsThe slices are quarter-inch, as printed. The brace joining turnip and carrot indicates the same measure for each, but that quantity is still missing from our text; half a cup of each is a reasonable amount for a stew of this size. The half onion and 1/4 cup flour are as printed.
- What the flour is forThe method is missing from this page; a quarter-cup of flour in a stew of this kind would either dredge the meat before browning or thicken the liquid at the end, or both. Browning the floured beef hard in beef fat or oil before any water goes in is the step that separates this from boiled meat.
- The missing dumplingsThe batter is not on this page. A standard turn-of-the-century baking-powder dumpling is 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt and about 3/4 cup milk, dropped by spoonfuls onto the simmering stew.
- Steam, do not boil, the dumplingsThey cook on top of the stew, not in it, under a tight lid for 12-15 minutes without lifting the cover. Breaking the steam partway through gives you dense, gluey centres.
- TimingThe beef needs 2 1/2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, barely bubbling; a rolling boil toughens the muscle fibres before the collagen has time to soften. Potatoes, carrot and turnip go in for only the last 30-40 minutes or they collapse.
- SeasoningThe printed list gives no salt or pepper; the missing method may have called for them. Salt the meat before browning and correct the broth once it has reduced.
- YieldFive pounds of bone-in beef with vegetables and dumplings feeds six to eight.
The aitchbone was a standard economy cut in nineteenth-century American and British kitchens: a big, bony, gelatinous piece from the hip that rewarded long moist cooking and fed a household cheaply, which is exactly why a cooking-school text put it at the head of a stew rather than a roast. The name is a corruption of "nache-bone," from the Old French for buttock, and it was often written "edge bone" or "H-bone" by butchers who had lost the etymology. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published in 1896, is remembered chiefly for insisting on level, standardised measurements, and an entry like this one shows the system at work, with vegetables specified by the cup and cut to a stated thickness. The dumplings on top are the American branch of a much older British tradition of suet and flour dough cooked over stewed meat; by Farmer's day chemical leavening seems largely to have displaced suet, and the drop dumpling raised with baking powder is generally taken to have become the usual form.