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Hard Dumplings
Mix with half a pound of flour, a small quantity of salt, and make into a paste with cold water, keeping it rather firm. Cut the paste into small portions, make into balls and plunge these into a saucepan of boiling water, and boil for twenty minutes, being careful not to lift the lid of the saucepan until the dumplings are done. Take them out of the saucepan, pull them apart in the center, and serve with preserves, butter, sugar or gravy.
A flour-and-water dumpling with no fat and no leavening, which is exactly what "hard" means here. Everything depends on an undisturbed hard boil and on tearing rather than cutting them open.
- Half a pound of flourAbout 1¾ cups of all-purpose flour. The recipe gives no water quantity; start with about ½ cup of cold water and add more a spoonful at a time only if needed, until the dough just comes together, firm and slightly dry rather than tacky.
- The lid stays onThis is the hinge of the recipe. Lifting the lid drops the water off the boil, and a dumpling that stops boiling partway through turns dense and gluey at the center. Keep the water at a full rolling boil for the whole twenty minutes.
- Pull, don't cutTearing the cooked dumpling open lets trapped steam escape and leaves a light, ragged interior; a knife blade tends to compress and smear the crumb, which may be why the instruction is specific.
- Size"Small portions" is not defined; something around golf-ball size is a reasonable reading, and larger balls may not cook through in twenty minutes at this density. Half a pound of flour makes roughly eight at that size.
- No leavening is intendedThere is no baking powder, no suet and no egg. Do not add any; the point of a hard dumpling is a chewy, close-textured ball that soaks up gravy. If you want a light dumpling, that is a different recipe.
- Salt the water tooThe dough carries only "a small quantity of salt." Salting the boiling water as you would for pasta improves them noticeably, since nothing else in the dumpling has flavor.
- ServingSweet or savory, as the original allows: butter and sugar or jam for a pudding course, pan gravy alongside a boiled or roasted joint. Serve immediately, as they toughen as they cool.
Hard dumplings are the plainest member of the English boiled-dumpling family: flour, salt and water, with none of the suet that goes into a dumpling meant for a stew pot and none of the yeast used in the raised Norfolk sort. They belong to the tradition of stretching a meal by boiling something starchy alongside or after the meat, and they might be served with gravy or else with sugar and preserves. Their presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 compendium suggests that the book may have been assembled as a working reference for a large hotel kitchen and for the household cooks who bought it, rather than purely as a record of Waldorf dining room dishes; alongside terrapin and lobster Newburg it carries the sort of frugal basics any cook was expected to know. The instruction never to lift the lid reflects kitchens where a pot that went off the boil on a coal range took a long time to recover.