Dumplings
2 cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 4 teaspoons baking powder teaspoon salt 1 cup milk or water Sift dry ingredients together in mixing bowl. Mix to drop batter with liquid. Drop from spoon into boiling stew, being careful that there is plenty of water and no possibility of boiling dry. Cover closely and cook undisturbed, and rapidly, for from ten to twenty minutes, depending on size of dumplings.
A plain drop-dumpling batter meant to be cooked on top of a stew. Note that the printed ingredient list here is incomplete, so read the points before you start.
- The missing flourThe list as printed begins mid-sentence: the flour, and the number before 'teaspoon salt', have dropped out. Four teaspoons of baking powder to one cup of liquid suggests roughly 2 cups of flour, and the lost salt measure was most likely 1/2 to 1 teaspoon. The original does not say so, so treat both figures as reconstruction.
- Baking powder strengthFour teaspoons for two cups of flour is generous by current standards, where 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup is normal. Older powders varied in strength and lost potency on the shelf, so recipes tended to hedge upward. Modern double-acting powder at that rate can leave a faintly metallic taste.
- Do not lift the lidThis is the hinge of the recipe. Dumplings rise on trapped steam; opening the pot drops the temperature, and the half-risen dough collapses into something dense. "Cover closely and cook undisturbed" is the whole technique.
- Keep the liquid at a rolling boil"Rapidly" means the stew must stay at a hard simmer or low boil throughout. Dumplings set in slack liquid sink and turn gummy underneath.
- Plenty of liquidThe warning about boiling dry is practical: dumplings absorb a surprising amount, and the stew should be soupier than you would serve it. Allow at least an inch of liquid above the solids before the dough goes in.
- TimingTen minutes suits tablespoon-sized dumplings, twenty is for large ones. Test with a skewer at the centre of the biggest; it should come out clean and the interior should look dry and open rather than glossy.
- Fat, if you want itAs printed this is a fatless batter, leaner and chewier than dumplings enriched with butter or suet. Cutting in 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter or suet gives a more tender crumb without changing the method.
- YieldDepends on the missing flour measure; on the assumption of about 2 cups of flour, expect roughly 18 to 24 spoon-sized dumplings.
Drop dumplings of this kind, flour and leavening bound with milk and steamed on the surface of a stew, were the everyday American answer to stretching a small quantity of meat across a large table. The dumpling was not a dish in itself but part of the stew's economy, a way of turning broth into a filling course. The reliance on baking powder rather than yeast or a suet crust marks the recipe as a product of the chemical-leavening era, though older boiled puddings and hard-flour dumplings persisted alongside it well into the twentieth century.