Dumplings
4 teaspoons baking powder ¾ cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons butter Mix and sift dry ingredients. Work in butter with tips of fingers, and add milk gradually, using a knife for mixing. Toss on a floured board, pat, and roll out to one-half inch in thickness. Shape with biscuit-cutter, first dipped in flour. Place closely together in a buttered steamer, put over kettle of boiling water, cover closely, and steam twelve minutes. A perforated tin pie-plate may be used in place of steamer. A little more milk may be used in the mixture, when it may be taken up by spoonfuls, dropped and cooked on top of stew.
In this case some of the liquid must be removed, that dumplings may rest on meat and potato, and not settle into liquid.
A steamed baking-powder dumpling of the plainest kind, meant to finish a beef stew. The whole thing turns on keeping the dough out of the liquid and the lid on.
- ProportionsThe list as printed gives leavening, salt, butter and milk but no flour. The standard Farmer ratio for this dough is 2 cups flour to 4 teaspoons baking powder, with about 3/4 cup milk; the milk figure in the text is garbled and should be read as three-quarters of a cup.
- Baking powder strengthFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is generous by modern standards, which generally run to about 1 to 1.5 teaspoons per cup of flour; expect a strongly leavened dumpling.
- The hinge: do not lift the lidKeep it covered -- The book says to cover closely, and that is the point of the method: lifting the lid lets the steam escape and the dumplings are apt to come out heavier.
- Keep them out of the brothFor the dropped version the book is right to insist on ladling off liquid first. Dumplings that sit in simmering stock rather than above it absorb it and disintegrate; they want to rest on the meat and potato with steam moving round them.
- Steamer improvisationThe "perforated tin pie-plate" is a trivet with holes. A metal colander, a folded rack, or a bamboo steamer set inside a wide pot all serve, provided the water does not touch the dough.
- HandlingAdd the milk gradually and mix with a knife, as directed. Rolled to half an inch and cut with a floured cutter, the rounds are placed closely together, as the book says.
- Doneness and yieldTwelve minutes is for rounds cut half an inch thick; the book gives neither cutter size nor yield, so reckon on roughly a dozen dumplings from two cups of flour.
Baking-powder dumplings belong to the era when chemical leavening replaced the older suet-and-yeast dough that had to be tied in a cloth and boiled for an hour. The dumpling is not a dish in itself but the cheap, filling top layer of a stew, stretching a small quantity of meat across a family table. The alternative given here, dropped by spoonfuls straight onto the stew, is the ancestor of what American cooks later came to call chicken and dumplings, while the steamer method keeps the dough lighter and drier and reflects the school's general preference for controlled, measurable technique over guesswork at the stove.