The English fancy themselves the kings of dumplings, proud lordlings of a doughy fiefdom. They believe this the historical and spiritual home of the dumpling, with almost every county trumpeting its own globular specimen. Norfolk is perhaps Dumpling Central, and its eponymous version is probably the simplest, certainly the readiest in former times: just a lump of leftover bread dough chucked in the cooking pot. The Suffolk spartans favour a yeast-free version; in Derbyshire and much of the north they add oatmeal. Dorset dumplings are sometimes known as "doughboys", conceivably because they float in the stock like the buoys around the coast. Scotland, too, has a fine dumpling, the clootie, a long, curranty way from the pale, bleak padders of the south.
In fact, the dumpling has a richer history and a wider reach than the English, with their island mentality, ever imagine. Central European dumplings display at least as much variety as those of the UK. The "dumplings" of Asia are often nothing of the kind, so called by Europeans who sought a name for oriental filled pastas like jiaozi, and landing us with this confusing nomenclature ever since. Those "dumplings" merit their own article, and I'll discuss them another time alongside ravioli, pelmeni and so on, which they resemble more closely.
"Dumpling" is one of the loveliest words in English, a term of endearment, indeed, for someone who doesn't mind being thought of as anaemic and squat. The archaic adjective "dump" meant doughy or dense, and "-ling" is suffix that, in this context, essentially converts the adjective into a noun. (Another term of endearment, "darling", does the same, with "dear" the adjective. And there's "youngling", of course, and "underling" ... ). The word "dumpling" emerges in the early 1600s but, of course, a name must already have existed for a lump of dough cooked in stock or stew, a "recipe" that's surely been around as long as bread.
"A dumpling is a food with few, indeed no, social pretensions," says the timeless Alan Davidson, and indeed they've always been plain and unabashed peasant grub, a cheap way to bulk a liquor or substitute for meat. The first dumplings, the Norfolks, are just bread dough thrown into a simmering pot: half-boiling and half-steaming, they expand into a slippery, comforting chew. The English pioneered the use of suet in dumplings and were the first to add herbs. Hannah Glasse's 1747 classic The Art of Cookery contains eight recipes for dumplings, including two with flour and water, two apple ones and others for Norfolks, yeasts, white breads and suets – each, she recommends, "as big as a turkey's egg". English dumplings, then, could either be sweet or savoury, while the addition of raisins, spices, jam and later syrup lifted the dumpling into the panoply of puddings, creating school dinner classics like jam roly-poly and spotted dick. Stop snigg*ring, you Americans.
But while England can claim to be one of the great dumpling centres, those vast swathes of central and eastern Europe enjoy greater variety in their dumplings. I first encountered Spätzle in Austria: they looked like the tooth fairy's wheelie bin and tasted feebly subdued, but their texture was a glorious interplay of rubbery and yielding. You make Spätzle with eggs, which technically makes them a kind of noodle, but no one would seriously bar these bitsy beauties from the dumpling clan. Spätzle, incidentally, are the baby brothers of Nockerl, itself related in name and function to gnocchi, the truest Italian dumpling.
The continentals, too, realised the potential of the dumpling. They probably created the filled version: the Austrian Zwetschkenknödel contains a sour cooking plum or Zwetschke, its stone replaced with a lump of sugar. And the Austrians may have invented the liver dumpling, with its pulped hepatic dough. This is a cousin of the Norwegian raspeballer, a potato dumpling with smoked lardons. The food anthropologist Signe Johansen pointed out to me how the raspeballer symbolises "a time when you eked out as much as you could from the land and local resources", adding that young Norwegians rarely eat them today because, "sadly, they're relics of a distant past".
The same phenomenon exists in Britain. Dumplings seem to have retreated, as a nation reared on Thai green curry and taramasalata finds little time for the mealy old lumps. Nor would I sound the clarion for some great dumpling revival: one must be realistic about the limits of thisleast sexy of foodstuffs. Fergus Henderson has a recipe for herby suet dumplings accompanying his boiled beef, and it's good to see Jamie Oliver plopping them in a stew. In America, dumplings are most famous in a chicken broth, a recipe pieced together in the Great Depression. What with the week we've had, and with what looms ahead, perhaps more will soon be turning to this stout English staple, which has often filled the stomach of a common man.
