Posts
I don't remember a lot from my university philosophy courses (and god forbid I should have stirred my stumps to upgrade my knowledge since then), but I do vaguely recall the idea of a Platonic ideal.
Pretending that I know what that means, I hereby dedicate myself to recovering the Platonic ideal of Hoosier chicken and dumplings.
That's what I call the dish, though I suspect its origins are more "Old Order" or Amish than actually native to Indiana. But the Hoosier state is where I ate it, so Hoosier it is to me.
And now I must confess that my mother never, to my knowledge, made this dish. She was not, after all, a native Hoosier but a transplanted woman of the world masquerading as a small-town Indiana housewife. Maybe the Old Guard—or some loose union of farm wives—never let her in on the secret.
Our Aunt Jeannette, wife of our father's brother John T., was the farm wife in question who made chicken and dumplings. This was a family dish, not a company one, so Jeannette didn't serve this when we came to dinner. In fact, the very first time I remember tasting Hoosier chicken and dumplings was at John T.'s funeral, when I was in my 40s. So, hardly a childhood memory.
Now, I love dumplings. Normal North American dumplings are essentially biscuit dough that is dropped by spoonfuls onto the top of a bubbling soup or stew. The lid is clapped on immediately and the stew or soup simmers for another 15 or 20 minutes while the steam cooks the biscuit dough. A very excellent dish.
But this is not Hoosier chicken and dumplings. Aunt Jeannette's dish was a rich chicken broth thickened with a slurry of flour and cold stock. Chicken meat was chunked up and added. The "dumplings" were actually a quick noodle dough rolled out to an eighth of an inch and cut into two-inch squares or diamonds before being dropped into the broth for cooking. The finished dish was a lightly thickened soup filled with chicken meat and noodles as soft as silk that slipped down your throat without benefit of chewing, if that's how you liked to eat them. The whole thing was usually over-salted, but I would never complain about that.
Several months ago I found a recipe. Not on-line, since that would be too active an approach for me. I prefer, apparently, to wait half a lifetime watching for the serendipitous appearance of whatever it is—in this case, a recipe for chicken and dumplings.
So yesterday I made Hoosier chicken and dumplings according to that accidentally found recipe. It was good, very filling, but it didn't even come close to my Platonic ideal of the dish. So now, having done the serendipity method, I'm off to interrogate Chef Google. He is sure to have two dozen or more recipes, so I'll pick and choose and alter and tweak and try it again. It was the noodles that were wrong in my attempt. Too thick and not soft enough. Perhaps it was the fact that one-third of the flour I used was spelt flour instead of all-purpose. Too much of a tweak.
This is a classic rural dish, most likely, as I said, of Mennonite or similar origin—thus essentially a German peasant dish. So it can't be that hard to make. If Aunt Jeannette—my mother's nemesis in so many ways—if Aunt Jeannette could turn out the Platonic version of Hoosier chicken and dumplings, then by golly so can I!
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment