By Rachel Hergett EBS COLUMNIST
Picture a classic American holiday table. In my mind and memory, this table has turkey or ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, candied yams, stuffing, rolls, my beloved green bean casserole and cranberry sauce. For most, that is a full table. But on my dad’s side of the family, no holiday meal is complete without the dumpling, the BIG dumpling.
The big dumpling is a round, bread-loaf sized hunk of slightly sweet dough with raisins that is wrapped in a cloth and boiled. I’d say the result is like a dense raisin bread, but there is no cinnamon or spice. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Dumplings, according to most sources, are small lumps of boiled or steamed dough. Small. So is the dumpling a misnomer and a mystery? How has this odd dish become a family staple?
The week before Thanksgiving, I decided to investigate. I called my aunt Jeannie, the current keeper of the big dumpling.
In all my young years, the making of the big dumpling was the responsibility of my grandma Dora, who would rush home from church services to boil the dumpling before making her way to the family farm for an early afternoon holiday meal.
“I honestly don’t know how she did it,” said Jeannie, who was handed the job because she didn’t go to the church services and thus had more time. She’s responsible for making sure the big dumpling makes it to the table. She’s the one with the recipe.
“Don’t give her that,” my uncle Gus joked in the background of our call when I started asking questions. “It’s a secret!”
Just because it’s a tradition, doesn’t make it a secret, I told him. Honestly, I have a bit of a laissez-faire attitude about the big dumpling. I’ll have a slice if it’s on offer, but am not sad if it’s not. The other side of my family has no such dish. But not everyone shares this sentiment. On one large family Thanksgiving, one of my dad’s cousins raged because my grandma had put dried cranberries in the big dumpling because she was out of raisins and most people smother the thing in cranberry sauce anyway. This, he said, was not the family’s big dumpling.
Jeannie and I spent hours on the phone, catching up on the family gossip and scouring the internet for similar dishes. The big dumpling recipe, as Jeannie had copied onto a sheet of lined paper, says the recipe is from one Minna Thormahlen, my great-great-grandmother. That side of the family is 100% German, ethnically. I used that as a clue, searching for “German sweet dumplings” and came up with the German dampfnudel and Austrian Germknödel, but those doughs include yeast.
Next, I turned to England, where a “pudding” is really a dense steamed or boiled dessert. The big dumpling is also similar to some English staples like spotted dick—yes, that’s a dish—and Christmas pudding, but those are made with suet instead of butter.
Scotland’s clootie dumplings are also made with suet, but led me to start thinking about the containers. A “clootie” is a cloth. Like the big dumpling, clootie dumplings are wrapped in cloth and boiled, whereas most British puddings seem to be steamed in a bowl. This too, was a dead end. According to historian Andrea Broomfield’s “Food and Cooking in Victorian England,” the English Christmas pudding was also boiled in a cloth prior to the 19th century. They even call it a pudding cloth.
While I was now armed with more knowledge about steamed and boiled puddings, the big dumpling’s origins remained elusive. So I reached out to my grandpa in Billings to see if he could provide insight. From the very first holiday he spent with his wife’s family, the dumpling was on their table. Because of this consistency, he remembers asking his mother if she knew of any similar German dish. She did not.
Next, I tried my great aunt Diane in Belfry, who answered from the middle of the fields on the family farm that hosts many a holiday. My grandma’s younger sister told the same story: There has simply always been a big dumpling.
I was going to try to make one to illustrate this story, but I worry that the action would make me the next in line to be the dumpling keeper. For me, the big dumpling is more about nostalgia than flavor. As the world moves at breakneck speed and everything around us changes, traditions like these tend to be grounding. We hold on to them tightly, even if their origins remain a mystery.
Rachel Hergett is a foodie and cook from Montana. She is arts editor emeritus at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and has written for publications such as Food Network Magazine and Montana Quarterly. Rachel is also the host of the Magic Monday Show on KGLT-FM and teaches at Montana State University.
Big Dumpling Recipe (Grandma Minna Thormahlen)
Cream together:
½ c. sugar
Butter the size of a walnut
Add 3 eggs one at a time and beat well.
Then add 2 c. milk (rich)
Stir in dry ingredients:
4 c. flour
2 t. baking powder
1 t. salt
When mixed, add 1 c. raisins that have been coated in flour.
Take a new sack cloth. Make wet in boiling water. Pour dough on wet cloth and tie loose 1 inch from dough.
Put in big kettle half full of boiling water. Boil 60 minutes.
