Tonight's dinner was Chicken & Dumplings. Admittedly it was a shortcut version of the dish; I used a pre-cooked chicken, cream of chicken soup, a recipe of biscuits, and my crock-pot. The original recipe called for just those ingredients and water. But I prefer my chicken & dumplings to have some vegetables, if for no other reason than I always have a hard time figuring out a vegetable to serve with it. So I added some carrots, celery and onion to the mix. Yes, I ended up making more of a creamy chicken stew with dumplings, but I'm calling it Chicken & Dumplings all the same.
I made this dish because it was what I wanted. I do ask my dearest if he has any special requests for when I am making my weekly menu plan, but sometimes I just plan things I know I want to eat. And it's still cold enough for the heavy, warming, winter-time dish. So I put it on the menu for Sunday.
As I sat down to savor the bowl of creamy, chicken & dumpling-y deliciousness, I began to wonder about the dish itself. I had not seen it on any menus in Australian restaurants, and frankly it's a perfect pub-style meal, definitely for a "meat and potatoes" crowd. That's not really unusual. Most of the meals I make come from my American cookbooks. But I had not really seen it on other menus either. I wasn't sure if the dish was French, Italian, English or something else entirely in origin.
Thinking about it, and knowing that it's at its heart a peasant dish (no wonder it is one of my favorites to make and enjoy), I really began to wonder if it's a French Country dish. But the dumplings kept tripping me up. Dumplings are far too much like biscuits to be French. So, maybe it's Celtic in heritage, as biscuits are very similar to scones. But, no, that can't be right either. I've not seen evidence of the Celts cooking scones by boiling them in a liquid. At the same time, dumplings, particularly noodle-style rolled dumplings are not unlike German Spaetzle, which are small pieces of egg-based dough boiled in broth. It's a culinary mystery to me.
So, okay. I've discounted several possible origins, and my feeling that Chicken & Dumplings is an American invention is more and more likely. The "melting pot" of American history makes this all the more believable, as well as the tradition of American ingenuity, as evidenced culinarily in an ability to adapt available products to create the traditional dishes immigrants brought with them. But I still have no actual proof the dish is an American invention.
Off to Wikipedia I went, and according to the sources there, Chicken & Dumplings is either American or French Canadian in origin. Yes, that sounds right. I can see it as a French Canadian dish, or even a Pennsylvania Dutch (German) dish. I can also see industrious cooks in the American South looking at the ingredients for the dumplings and discovering they were remarkably similar to biscuits, so similar in fact, that the same dough could be used. That may also explain the disparity and disagreements in the style of dumplings used in North & South variations of the dish. Flat, noodle-style dumplings tend to be the Southern preference while Northern variants tend to have fluffy, dropped balls of dough as the dumplings.
My dumplings were made with a batch of biscuit dough, rolled and cut, but no so thin as to be Southern-style rolled dumplings, but not so fluffy as to be Northern-style dropped dumplings. I grew up in New Orleans, which while geographically in the Southern part of the US, is not Southern in either its history or attitude. New Orleans has always been individual, and its always been a true melting pot. How else do you explain the local melding of disparate cuisines, long before the term "fusion cuisine" was invented or became a hipster badge?
Anyway, my bowl of chicken & dumplings led to an internal monologue on culinary history. Meals are often like that with me. Somewhere along the way, I'll wonder about dish -- its origins, history, or how I can create a variation at home.
Tonight's dinner was Chicken & Dumplings. But more than that, tonight's dinner was a bowl of history.
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