No. 3030

Dampfnoodles with Cream

Dampfnouilles a la Creme

Put half a pound of flour into a basin and make a hollow in the center; lay in it a quarter of an ounce of compressed yeast and dissolve it slowly with two gills of warm milk, adding the flour so as to obtain a soft paste; cover it over with a cloth and leave it in a mild temperature to rise to double its volume; then incorporate into this sponge four egg-yolks, four spoonfuls of sugar and half a pound of flour added very slowly, and lastly two ounces of butter; mix well for one minute in order to give the paste a good body, then lay it in a vessel and let rise to double its volume. Work it on a floured table and roll into strings; divide each of these into pieces and shape them into balls an inch and a quarter in diameter; range these in a buttered sautoir, three-quarters of an inch apart, and leave them to rise again to double their volume. Now pour sufficient boiling vanilla-flavored milk over to have the balls swim to half their height; cover hermetically and put the sautoir in a hot oven for fifteen to eighteen minutes. Detach them from the pan, and dress in a pyramid on a dish; cover over with some English cream sauce (No. 3004) and serve more of the same separately.

← No. 3029 Cupola a la Madison Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3031 Stuffed Eggs →

For the Modern Kitchen

Dampfnudeln are steamed-and-braised yeast dumplings: the pan is sealed so the tops cook in vanilla steam while the bottoms sit in milk and colour. Everything depends on not lifting the lid.

Keep the pan sealedThe milk should come only halfway up the balls, and the lid must stay on for the full 15 to 18 minutes. Opening it drops the steam and the risen dumplings collapse into dense knots.
Gills and spoonfulsTwo gills is one cup of warm milk. The "four spoonfuls of sugar" is genuinely vague in Ranhofer's usage — tablespoons is the likely reading, giving roughly 2 oz, and that suits a lightly sweet dough.
YeastA quarter ounce of compressed (fresh cake) yeast is about a teaspoon of instant dry yeast, or a scant 1 1/2 teaspoons of active dry. Fresh cake yeast is still sold in some markets but is not needed here.
Flour, totalHalf a pound goes into the sponge and half a pound into the enriched dough — one pound, roughly 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 cups, in all. Add the second half slowly as directed; the dough should stay soft and slightly tacky rather than firm.
SautoirA sautoir is a wide, straight-sided sauté pan. Use any shallow ovenproof pan with a genuinely tight-fitting lid, or cover with foil crimped hard at the rim. A 10- to 12-inch pan holds the batch without crowding once the balls have risen.
A hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'hot oven' here means something in the region of 400-425F. The heat drives the steam and sets the dumplings quickly; a cool oven leaves them soggy at the waterline.
English cream sauceNo. 3004 is crème anglaise — a stirred custard of egg yolks, sugar, milk and vanilla, cooked to just under 180F and strained. Any modern pouring-custard recipe stands in.
YieldThe recipe states no yield. Balls only an inch and a quarter across, made from a pound of flour, will run to several dozen rather than eighteen or twenty.

A Little History

Dampfnudel is a southern German and Austrian dish — the name means simply "steam noodle," noodle in the older sense of any piece of soft dough — and it is traditionally cooked in a covered pan over milk or sweetened water until the bottom crusts. Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, filed it under his French title Dampfnouilles à la Crème, which is how a Germanic dumpling entered an American restaurant repertoire dressed as a French entremets: pyramided on a dish and flooded with crème anglaise. Sweet yeast-raised dumplings of this kind were everyday cooking in Bavaria and Alsace long before they were plated in Manhattan, and the technique — half braise, half steam, lid never lifted — is the part that survived the translation unchanged.