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Huckleberry Dumplings
1½ cups left-over 1 teaspoonful vinegar 1 teaspoonful cinnahuckleberries 4 tablespoonfuls sugar mon 3 tablespoonfuls water Put above ingredients into saucepan and let them come just to the boil. While these are heating sift together one cup of flour, two teaspoonfuls of baking-powder, and one-eighth teaspoonful of salt. Beat up one egg, add to it about two tablespoonfuls of milk, and stir lightly into the dry materials. There should be just liquid enough to wet the flour, and make a very stiff dough. Drop by spoonfuls into the boiling huckleberries, cover tightly, and boil ten minutes without removing the cover. Serve at once. A mixture of huckleberries and currants may be used, and the vinegar omitted.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting; read it as 1½ cups leftover huckleberries, 4 tablespoons sugar, 3 tablespoons water, 1 teaspoon vinegar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon. What follows is a steamed dumpling, not a baked one, and the method depends on that.
- Do not lift the lidThe dumplings cook in trapped steam above a very shallow layer of fruit. Uncovering the pan during the ten minutes drops the steam and leaves the tops raw and gluey.
- The liquid is scant on purposeThree tablespoons of water plus the juice released by cooked berries is all the moisture there is. Use a small heavy saucepan with a tight lid; the recipe calls for a boil, so watch that the fruit does not scorch.
- HuckleberriesTrue huckleberries are a wild fruit rarely sold fresh. Cultivated blueberries substitute directly, though they are sweeter and less tart.
- Why the vinegarA teaspoon of vinegar sharpens flat, over-sweet cooked fruit. The note about omitting it with currants fits that logic: currants bring their own acid. With supermarket blueberries, keep it; with tart wild berries, taste first.
- A teaspoon of cinnamonThat is a heavy hand for 1½ cups of fruit by current taste. Half a teaspoon reads as seasoning rather than dominating the berries.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to one cup of flour is on the high side by modern standards, but the leavening has only ten minutes and a very stiff dough to work on. Use a fresh tin; old baking powder will leave the dumplings flat and dense.
- Dough consistencyStir only until the flour is damp and the mass holds on a spoon in a lump. Overworking gives tough dumplings, and adding milk beyond the two tablespoons produces batter that spreads into the fruit instead of sitting on it.
- Yield and servingOne cup of flour makes only a handful of small dumplings, enough for two or three people. The recipe says serve at once; eat them hot, with cream if you have it.
This comes from the tradition of fruit "slumps" and "grunts" — dumplings dropped onto simmering berries in a covered pot, the names often said to derive from the sound and appearance of the results — a stovetop technique that predates dependable home ovens in North America and survived long after them because it is quick and uses very little fuel. Huckleberries were gathered wild rather than bought, which explains their appearance in a book about leftovers: a good picking day produced more fruit than a household could eat fresh, and whatever was stewed or served at one meal came back the next day under dough. The book belongs to a run of manuals preoccupied with domestic thrift, in which the reuse of cooked food was treated as a skill to be taught rather than an embarrassment to be hidden.