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Indian Dumplings
Skin a quarter of a pound of beef suet, chop fine and dredge well with flour; add one saltspoonful of salt and a pint and a half of cornmeal, and mix all together well; add sufficient milk to form a stiff dough, knead well and divide into equal portions. On a well floured paste-board, form into balls not larger than an orange, beat them with a rolling-pin to make them light, and then tie them loosely in small cloths dipped into boiling water, wrung dry and well floured. Plunge the dumplings into boiling water and keep boiling incessantly for two hours; then take them out and dip for an instant into cold water before untying the cloths. Serve hot with boiled meat.
A boiled cornmeal dumpling of the old English pudding-cloth school, meant to be cooked alongside or served beside boiled beef. Almost everything about it hinges on the cloth and on the water never dropping off the boil.
- The hinge: unbroken boilingIf the pot goes off the boil even briefly, water soaks into the dough and the dumpling turns sodden and grey at the centre. Keep the water at a full rolling boil the whole two hours and top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold.
- "Indian" means cornmealIndian meal was the standard nineteenth-century term for maize meal, and Oscar has helpfully already spelled it out. Use a medium or fine yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not masa harina, which is lime-treated and behaves differently.
- MeasuresA saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon. A pint and a half of cornmeal is 3 cups by volume, roughly 15 oz; the flour for dredging the suet is unmeasured, and 2 to 3 tablespoons is enough to coat a quarter pound.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and often only on request. Skinning means stripping off the papery membrane; chop it while very cold, or grate it frozen. Packaged shredded suet is already floured and can go straight in.
- The clothsSquares of unbleached cotton or linen about 12 inches across, scalded, wrung out and floured, are what give the crust its skin. Tie loosely with kitchen string so the dough can swell. Cheesecloth is too open; a cut-up old pillowcase or a floursack towel works.
- Beating with the rolling pinThe recipe gives the purpose as 'to make them light'. Cornmeal dough has little or no gluten structure, and the usual explanation is that knocking the balls flat and reforming them breaks up dense pockets; treat that as a plausible reading rather than a documented one.
- The cold-water dipThe usual explanation is that an instant in cold water shrinks the surface away from the cloth so it peels off cleanly. Any longer and you risk chilling the dumpling through.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; balls 'not larger than an orange' from this quantity should give something in the region of four to six dumplings. They want the broth or gravy from the boiled meat; on their own they are very plain, and a little more salt than the original allows is no crime.
Boiled dumplings tied in floured cloths came to American kitchens straight out of the English pudding tradition, where the cloth stood in for a mould long before pudding basins and moulds were common in ordinary households. Substituting cornmeal for wheat flour is the American turn, and the name records it: "Indian meal" was how maize was distinguished from "flour," which meant wheat unless stated otherwise, and the usage survives in Indian pudding and rye-and-Indian bread. That such a frugal, farmhouse dish appears in a Waldorf book is less odd than it looks. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume is as much a general household reference as a hotel manual, and its long American section sits alongside the French service he was famous for.