07/04/26 - Chicken and Dumplings
A creamy stew consisting of chicken breast, peas, carrots, celery, onions and garlic. Spoonfuls of biscuit-like dough are boiled in the stew until cooked, and the dish is served topped with parsley. Made following this recipe from Tastes Better From Scratch!
Warm, comforting, delicious. It tastes pretty similar to chicken pot pie! It's basically the filling, just in a soup. Also, it's a really reallly hearty meal.
I think I use the word 'hearty' pretty often, but I take it all back. This is like hearty x 1000. It's so insanely filling, comforting, and delicious. I ate one bowl and I felt like I didn't need to eat for the rest of the day.
The first step in this recipe is making a mirepoix! I recognized it when the smell hit me (which is insanely fragrant), and it made me wonder what the origins of this dish were. It seemed odd to me that a Southern comfort dish started with a French aromatic base, and some quick digging told me that, on top of being popular in the Southern and Midwestern United states, this dish is also sometimes attributed to being a French-Canadian meal as well.
However, that still doesn't really answer the question of where this dish comes from. To find that out, I did some digging, and... I came up short. The best I can proffer is a quote from Ronni Lundy, a James Beard award-winning author, who said "[t]he dish probably began in a woman’s kitchen whose name we’ll never know." And that makes sense—as with many of the struggle dishes that have stuck around, the intention was to stretch food, and the meals just happened to be good enough to stay in our minds throughout history.
I also had to ask: why is it called dumplings? As a Chinese-American person, this dish confused me, because I grew up thinking dumplings referred to 饺子, a Chinese dumpling, so this idea that this boiled bit of dough could be called a dumpling really weirded me out at first. So, I did quite a bit of digging.
My journey led me down a long and winding rabbit hole, until I found this documentary by PBS, which aired in 2020, showcasing various types of dumplings across different parts of the United States. From those that I already knew about, like Chinese-style dumplings, or chicken and dumplings, to types I didn't think about, like gnocchi, or matzo ball soup.
But the documentary highlights so much more than just food. It shows the history of people, like the Chinese immigrant population in Mississipi and the history of Chinese markets in the South, the history of how matzo ball soup came to be, the techniques used to create Italian dumplings, and the idea that noodles might also be dumplings?
The interviewer comes to a really beautiful conclusion, which I'd love to share with you here:
"[w]hat I know is that dumplings stretch stuff. Morsels of meat and bits of vegetables feel like more when wrapped in a dumpling skin. Broth becomes a meal with dumpling in it's depths. And dumplings stretch time. The time people spend together preparing and sharing dumplings, becomes more than moments in a day. That time morphs into memories, laughter, stories, and love. Dumplings are hard to define, because they mean so much."
And that rings so very, very true. What was a way to stretch food has become an important cultural touchstone in many different cultures. I personally have hosted my friends over at my place to make dumplings and chat together, and those moments stretched out to eternity.
And if you're still just wondering how the word got from Chinese dumplings to Southern-style dumplings, the answer is: it didn't! I mean, of course, dumpling is an English word, and I'm that the first westerner to see shaped bits of dough, boiled in water might've been like "hey! That looks like our dumplings!", and the name stuck.
