My chicken's glamour shot
Today, Cookbook Obsession returns to the Antoinette Pope School Cookbook. for “Friccasee of Chicken” with “Fluffy Bread Crumb Dumplings.” Sounds delicious, right?
Think again.
Oh, the chicken was okay. I’ve made better. The dumplings, however, were a disaster.
I love dumplings. I’ve made dumplings before, but never bread crumb dumplings. I wish I hadn’t. For you curious souls, I will describe the Friccassee first:
Chicken pieces are boiled in 1 cup of water per pound of chicken, along with salt, celery, onions, and parsley. Then the chicken is removed and pan-browned (to make it “more attractive and delicious”) while the broth is strained and made into a basic flour gravy, using 2.5 T. of flour per cup of liquid.
It’s pretty straightforward, if rather bland.
The dumplings, however, were a different story.
They consisted of 2 eggs, a half cup of toasted bread crumbs, a tablespoon of melted butter, salt, pepper, garlic salt, and parsley. The ingredients were mixed together, covered, and refrigerated for two hours, after which level tablespoons were dropped into rapidly boiling water, where they… disintegrated. They completely disintegrated, as if there had been no egg added to them whatsoever. The cute little dumpling balls I had created became nothing more than pond scum at the top of my pot of water.
How disappointing.
How I was supposed to let these things cook for 15 minutes and pull dumplings out of the water was beyond me. It would have been akin to putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. I decided to grab a slotted spoon and gather my dumpling scum into little scoops, which stayed together well enough for me to scoop from the pot.
Dumplings, my foot.
Antoinette had assured me that these dumplings could be made hours ahead of time and then dropped back into the sauce/gravy at the last minute. Thus, I had several hours to contemplate them as they sat in the fridge, looking soggy and rather uninviting.
At this point, I had three choices:
1. I could stick to my guns and serve the dumplings,
2. I could make some Bisquick dumplings,
or
3. I could make some matzoh balls for backup.
I went with the matzoh balls.
Making matzoh balls is easy, as long as you follow the recipe on the matzoh meal package, but let them chill in the fridge for much longer than the 15 minutes that they specify. Sometimes, for some unknown reason you end up with “sinkers,” but since I’ve been chilling them longer, it’s been much rarer.
This is my chicken's tabloid shot. Yikes.
Well, as you can see from the photo, the chicken did not become much more attractive after it had been pan browned, but it was passable. My suspicion regarding the dumplings was 100% correct. They tasted like soggy toast. Stuart and I declared them “Not Food” and gladly ate the matzoh balls instead, but my dog Zoe gladly ate the few dumplings that Stuart offered her from the table.
This is in no way any sort of vindication for the dumpling recipe, as I regularly chastise Zoe for eating bunny poop.
They only look bad because they are.
So, “Fricassee of Chicken = passable, but not worth the effort. Fluffy Bread Crumb Dumplings = Food FAIL. Completely unworthy of Cookbook Obsession.
[...] I did not expect much from this one. The ingredients seemed blah, and after my experience with the Bread Crumb Dumplings, I’ve been a little skeptical of recipes that call for bread crumbs. That’s why I made [...]