I just watched Trisha Yearwood make chicken and dumplings. Hers were so much not like mine it could have been a different dish all together. Firstly, her dumplings were thin strips that looked like fat noodles and her broth was clear. It looked much more like chicken noodle soup.
When I make chicken and dumplings, the dumplings are round and poofy (and if I’m not careful, heavy and super dense) and the broth is on the thicker side. In fact, if I’m cheating and don’t feel like cooking up a whole soup from scratch, I’ll make my broth with chicken stock and a can of cream of chicken soup.
So. . . is thin, flat, clear chicken and dumplings a thing?
My chicken & dumplings is thick like stew, and I make the farina dumplings from The Joy of Cooking (its egg beaten into cooked cream of wheat & simmered on the surface of the stew in blobs).
The foundation recipe is from “The Colonial Williamsburg Cookbook” (it calls for a more traditional biscuit batter dumpling) and is based on historically known recipes and preparations from the early Colonial period in Virginia. So I feel pretty safe saying that C&D made with noodles & a clear broth is unAmerican and the work of communists hellbent on destroying our great nation.
I’ve always seen that dish called chicken and noodles. There is a small church in this area that is known for their chicken and noodle dinner fundraisers about four times a year.
Ours is like a thick chicken stew with fat noodles. The ball kind is weird. Not so much the shape, as the texture. They shouldn’t be fluffy, but dense and kinda chewy.
No, chicken tetrazinni is a casserole, and it has cheese and white wine in it. Completely different.
In my world there’s chicken and noodles, and chicken and dumplings.
Chicken and noodles has thin, handmade egg noodles in it. Often some yellow food coloring, too.
Chicken and dumplings is chicken stew with biscuits on top. You make the stew, put the biscuits on top, and bake it in the oven so the biscuits get all browned and crisp on top, the way biscuits are supposed to be.
Only as an adult did I encounter the abominable frankendish that MCL Cafeteria calls “chicken and dumplings”, with the big fat noodles. It’s just wrong.
Chicken in nice sized chunks in a very thick gravy like sauce, and then popped in with drop biscuits studding the top. I also make it the way Mom grew up making it, with the thick strips of effectively egg noodles [but like a quarter inch thick by half an inch wide and about 3 or 4 inches long] I have cheated and made spaetzel into the chicken and gravy by ‘scraping’ the dough off the bottom of a cutting board.
[URL=“http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/”]
I’ ve never seen balls? I live down south and ours are always rolled out into thin strips that are maybe several inches long and very thin , though I cheat and buy mine frozen from the grocery store and add to my boiled chicken.
I do sometimes add a can of cream of chicken soup ,if I have it around, mostly to add flavor. The dumplings come coated with flour which thickens the broth or I can thicken slightly with cornstarch.
I have heard of people making so called dumplings with canned biscuits but I don’t think I’d like that!
Mine and my family’s are flat and roughly 2" square. The broth is thickened by the flour and definitely not clear. In my experience, drop dumplings aren’t very common in the South. It seems like they would be too heavy and dense. And biscuits on top makes it more like a pot pie than chicken and dumplings.
One aunt did make drop dumplings instead of rolled. She also left the chicken on the bone, so you’d get dumplings and a whole drumstick or breast. I suspect her recipe changes were just due to laziness (no rolling, no deboning). She always thought of cooking as a chore.
Haven’t had them in years, but I used to make them from Bisquick and they were the pillows. Split them open and insert a goodly amount of butter and oh, yeah.
