Old Timey Chicken n’ Dumplings
Posted by Ben | Under Lick The Plate Clean Recipes, Main Dish Saturday Oct 11, 2008In the South, your culinary skills are quickly defined based on how well you can make this legendary dish. Countless variation exists, and I will attempt to post many of them as this is one of my all time favorite meals.
A funny story… Bubba Mills from Okeechobee, Florida lived several doors down from my dorm room at Palm Beach Atlantic University. His mother sent back a huge pot of chicken n’ dumplings one weekend. Everyone came and ate, including a few guys from the North who never heard of this dish. Well, one of the guys had something odd looking in his scoop of food and Bubba quickly identified it as the chicken heart, everyone wanted to see it. Bubba considered it a delicacy and quickly stabbed it with a fork and ate it! Did I forget to mention that Bubba’s mother made this dish using a truly fresh chicken!
Old Timey Chicken n’ Dumplings
1 Whole chicken
Salt and Black Pepper
Cut the chicken into quarters and place in a pot and cover with water. Simmer the chicken until tender. When the chicken is tender, add the salt and black pepper to taste.
Dumplings:
2 cups of flour
3 tablespoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt
3 tablespoons of lard or shortening
1 egg, beaten well
1 cup of whole milk
Sift together the flour, baking powder, and the salt. Cut in the lard or shortening and mix in the egg and milk. Drop the dumplings by spoonfuls into the pot of chicken and broth and cook for 15 minutes or until the dumplings are done.
NOTE: stir carefully as you do not want to break apart the dumplings.
Now you’ve hit my heart-button. Chicken and dumplin’s (hey, Sarah Palin — we were dropping g’s before you were born!) are the quintessential Southern comfort food.
My mom made the rolled dumplings. You missed one crucial factor in the recipe: It must be a hen — and a fatty one at that, in the pot. I use a roaster to make sure it’s a nice fat hen since good fresh chickens are hard to come by.
Mom used a very plain dumpling dough: She’d skim the chicken fat and some off the broth from the top of the pot where the chicken cooked, mix it with seasoned flour, and make a stiff dough. She’d roll it out on a well floured board, using a thick iced tea glass (wine bottle works great, or so does a rolling pin - but she never owned one). She’d roll the dough thin as could be, then, using a table knife, lay her hand palm-up on the dough and cut between her fingers to make long strips, about 1-1/2 inches wide and 3 inches long. The dumplings were dropped carefully into the simmering chicken broth (chicken had been taken off the bone and skinned, then put back; lots of salt and pepper in the pot). With the back of a big spoon, she’d dunk the dumplings, then cover the pot and make more dumplings. This was repeated until the pot was full or the dough ran out - whichever came first. They would simmer gently, with only a very slight stir, and the flour from the dough made the broth thick and rich. The dumplings would puff slightly and become so tender…
Every year, she’d make whatever we wanted on our birthdays for dinner; I always chose this meal.
Of course, it made enough for the Prussian army, so we’d always have guests when she made these. Strange how no matter how sophisticated the diners, after eating these, they’d ask always to be called to supper when Nellie was making chicken and dumplin’s again.
I haven’t made them since my husband died — no one to eat them but me. Sadly, they don’t freeze.
Now, though, I know whom to call when I make them again.
Wine recommendation: The house wine of the South: Sweet iced tea.
hey - it ain’t Real Old Timey unless you kill and pluck your own chicken first. HA HA!!! And with the Economy - - I think I’ll start building my chicken herd up.
Jan, I agree with you. We’re from Tennessee and my grandmother and mother always made the rolled kind of dumplings and they did prefer to use a hen. I rarely make them, but I do love them. The Cracker Barrel makes pretty good ones, but none can compare with what I had as a child.