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Sift
Season one cup of chopped meat with salt, pepper, and a drop or two of Tabasco sauce. together three-quarters of a cup of flour. one and one-half teaspoonfuls of baking-powder, and oneeighth teaspoonful of salt. Beat one egg until light, add to it two tablespoonfuls of milk, and stir this into the flour mixture. If this does not wet up all of the flour add more milk. The dough should be very stiff. Stir the meat into this, and drop by spoonfuls into boiling stock or boiling salted water and cook, tightly covered, about ten minutes. Serve at once with tomato sauce.
These are meat dumplings — a stiff baking-powder dough carrying a cup of cooked beef, poached in stock. Simple, but the dough consistency and the covered pot are what decide whether they hold together.
- Keep the lid onThe dumplings rise on steam trapped above the liquid as much as on the baking powder. Lift the cover during the ten minutes and they collapse into heavy lumps. Set the pot at a bare simmer, cover tightly, and leave it alone.
- The dough should be stiffStiff here means it barely leaves the spoon — closer to a thick biscuit dough than a batter. Slack dough disintegrates in the liquid. Add milk a teaspoon at a time once the flour is nearly wet.
- Measures in modern termsThree-quarters cup flour is about 95 g. One cup of chopped meat is roughly 5 oz / 140 g. Chop it fine; large pieces tear the dough as it expands.
- Baking powderMany period baking powders were single-acting, and strength varied by brand. One and a half teaspoons in three-quarters cup of flour is generous by modern standards; a scant teaspoon of double-acting powder gives comparable lift without a soapy edge.
- Simmer, do not boilThe original has the liquid at a boil when the dumplings go in and says nothing about the heat afterwards. Dropping to a lazy simmer is the safer course; a rolling boil batters them apart.
- Cook in stock if you have itWater gives a bland dumpling and a useless cooking liquid. Beef stock seasons the dough from the outside in, and the pot liquor can be reduced or thickened as a second sauce.
- Test before servingTen minutes suits tablespoon-sized dumplings. Split one: the centre should be dry and crumbed, not gluey. Larger spoonfuls want twelve to fourteen minutes.
- YieldAbout eight to ten dumplings, enough for two as a main course with the tomato sauce, or four alongside soup.
Books of "left overs" were a recognisable genre in American and British publishing from the 1890s through the 1920s, when a joint of beef was bought whole and the cook was judged on what she did with it on Tuesday. Dropping chopped meat into a baking-powder dough and poaching it belongs to the same thrifty family as the suet dumpling — a way to make a small quantity of meat read as a full dish by surrounding it with something starchy and hot. Tabasco is the modern touch here: the sauce had been sold commercially since 1868, and by the turn of the century it appears in American household cookery alongside the older cayenne.