Dumplings
1¾ cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 tablespoon Mazola 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 3/4 cup milk or water Sift together the dry ingredients, stir in the Mazola and milk, and drop small tablespoons onto the boiling stew. Cover and boil gently fifteen to twenty minutes.
A straightforward drop dumpling, distinguished by the cornstarch that lightens the flour. The recipe comes from a corn-products promotional book, so brand names stand in for generic ingredients.
- The garbled measurement"13/4 cups flour" is 1 3/4 cups, a typesetting artifact of the fraction. With 1/4 cup cornstarch that gives 2 cups of dry starch total, in proportion to 3/4 cup liquid — a stiff drop batter, not a pourable one.
- Brand namesMazola is corn oil; any neutral oil works. Argo and Kingsford's are cornstarch, and the two names appear because both were owned by the same company. The cornstarch is not thickener here — it dilutes the gluten and gives a more tender crumb, so do not leave it out and add more flour.
- Do not lift the lidThe hinge of the whole method. Dumplings cook in trapped steam above the liquid, not submerged in it; every peek drops the temperature and gives you dense, gummy centers. Cover and leave it covered for the full time.
- "Boil gently"Meaning a steady simmer with the surface just moving. A hard rolling boil batters the dumplings apart.
- Fifteen to twenty minutes is rightFifteen to twenty minutes -- Small tablespoon-sized dumplings on a hot stew need that long for the interior to set. Test one by splitting it — the center should be dry and open, not glossy.
- The stew must be liquid enoughThe recipe assumes a stew with real broth. If yours has reduced to a thick gravy, the dumplings will sit in it and stew rather than steam; add stock until there is an inch or so of visibly simmering liquid.
- YieldRoughly a dozen dumplings, depending on the size of the spoonfuls. Space them apart on the surface — they swell as they cook.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, the firm behind Mazola oil, Argo cornstarch and Kingsford's cornstarch, which in the first decades of the twentieth century distributed cookbooks whose real purpose was to find new domestic uses for corn. Substituting oil for the butter or suet a nineteenth-century dumpling would have used, and cornstarch for part of the wheat flour, is exactly the kind of gentle reformulation such books were written to promote. Drop dumplings themselves are much older and much plainer: a batter spooned onto stew was one way to stretch a small quantity of meat, and the technique predates baking powder. The use of Mazola places this particular version in the twentieth century.