Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Dumplings for Broth
Dumplings for Broth
Sift together one teaspoonful of baking powder and one heaped breakfast cupful of flour; add a pinch of salt and mix tea smooth soft dough with water. Drop small quantities of this with a spoon into the broth where they should float, and put on the lid. When they are about three-parts done, put the saucepan into the oven, first removing the lid and brown the tops of the dumplings, basting them once with the liquor.
Sago Dumplings for Soup, (German).
Boil the requisite quantity of sago in milk, stirring it with a wooden spoon until it is thick and clear; turn it onto a dish in a layer about one inch thick and leave it until it is cold. Then cut it into small rounds with a tin cutter and form them into balls. Pour boiling soup into a tureen; dip the balls in beaten egg, put them in the soup, and serve.
Two dumplings in one entry: a plain water-and-flour drop dumpling finished in the oven, and a German sago dumpling that is really a garnish for clear soup. Both are written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen, and the first paragraph carries an obvious typesetting slip.
- The garbled line"Mix tea smooth soft dough with water" is a printer's or scanner's error for "mix to a smooth soft dough with water." Add the water a spoonful at a time; the dough should be soft enough to drop from a spoon but not pourable.
- A heaped breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally 8 to 10 fluid ounces, and "heaped" adds an unmeasurable amount on top. Treat it as roughly 5 to 6 ounces of flour by weight and adjust with water until the dough behaves.
- Simmer, do not boilThe hinge of the first recipe is the surface of the broth. Dumplings dropped into a hard boil break up and dissolve into the soup; a bare simmer with the lid on lets them set and puff. Resist lifting the lid for the first several minutes.
- Into the ovenThe saucepan goes in uncovered, so it must be an ovenproof pan with an ovenproof handle. The recipe gives no temperature: a hot oven, briefly, is enough to brown the tops without drying them, and the single basting with the liquor helps keep them from crusting hard.
- SagoSago is starch from the pith of the sago palm, sold as small pearls. Pearl tapioca behaves much the same way and is easier to find. Cook it in milk until the pearls are translucent and the mass pulls away from the spoon, or the cooled slab will not hold a shape.
- Chilling is not optionalThe sago must be fully cold and firm before cutting, or the rounds will slump when rolled. An hour in the refrigerator on a shallow dish will do; the original simply says to leave it until cold.
- The egg coatingThe balls are dipped in raw beaten egg and set into soup already in the tureen, which does not reliably cook the egg. Use pasteurized egg, or slip the coated balls into the simmering soup in the pot for a minute so the coating sets.
- YieldThe flour quantity should give something like ten to twelve small dumplings, enough garnish for a few bowls of broth. The sago recipe gives no quantity at all -- only "the requisite quantity" -- so the amount of pearls and milk has to be judged by the depth of the slab you want, about one inch as directed.
Dumplings dropped straight into the broth they will be served in are among the oldest economies in European cooking, and Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was ma u00eetre d'h u00f4tel of the Waldorf, records them alongside the elaborate French service the hotel was famous for. The oven-browning step is an unusual touch. The second recipe is labeled German for good reason: sago garnishes such as Sagokl u00f6 u00dfchen appear in nineteenth-century German soup cookery, and sago itself, imported from the palm groves of the Malay Archipelago, was one of the cheap starches that reached Western kitchens through colonial trade. It was also a fixture of invalid cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, valued as bland and easily digested, which is part of why it appears in so many books of the period and in so few today.