Beef Stew with Dumplings Recipe ingredients

To prepare this Beef Stew with Dumplings Recipe, first use the flank ends cut from roast or steak, chuck, or a shin piece. There should be some bone and fat with the lean, as these give a richer flavor and the meat is more juicy than a clear, solid piece of lean. Two or three pounds of meat will make a stew for six or eight people.

Cut the meat in rather small pieces, and cut it from the bone; brown them in hot drippings, turning the pieces so they will brown on all sides.

Put the meat in a good-sized stewpan with the bones and any remnants of cold roast or steak. Put in with it 2 small onions, 1 small carrot, scraped and diced or sliced very thin, and, if liked, 1 small turnip, peeled and diced. Cover with boiling water and cook slowly two hours or longer. Take out all the bones and the pieces of fat; skin the fat from the liquor, add salt, pepper, and a dash of paprika.

Have 6 or 8 medium-sized potatoes pared and soaked in cold water while the meat was cooking. Put these in and boil more rapidly than before. See that the water just comes to the top of the meat and potatoes.

To make the dumplings, take 2 cupfuls of sifted flour; into one-half the flour rub a piece of butter the size of a walnut, into the other half sift 3 level teaspoonfuls of baking-powder; mix the two parts together, add a saltspoonful of salt, mix quickly with enough milk to make a rather soft dough, just stiff enough to hold in good shape when dropped from the spoon. Drop in balls from the spoon into the boiling stew, where they should rest on top of the potatoes, without sinking under the liquor.

Cover quickly and closely and boil rapidly fifteen minutes without lifting the cover. The dumplings should be put in when the potatoes are half cooked, so that both will be done at the same time. The dumplings should be light and fluffy and as easy of digestion as any hot bread. To dish, carefully remove the dumplings to a hot plate, put the meat and potatoes in a deep hot platter with the dumplings around them, and set in a hot oven. Add to the gravy in the stewpan 2 spoonfuls of tomato catsup, a little minced parsley, more salt if needed, and if it requires thickening, add a little rice or potato flour moistened with water; let it boil up until thick and pour over the meat. If there is too much gravy to serve in the dish with the meat, put the rest in a hot gravy tureen.