Eastern Shore Chicken and Dumplings

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is famous for its chickens and famous for its dumplings, which are almost paper thin, wide-cut, and slick. Some grocery stores have something called Anne’s Dumplings, which are close, but not quite the same.

This weekend, we finally had the chance to learn from a master — a friend who grew up making the recipe for his family of 10 on the Shore. As with Indiana’s variation of this dish, the appeal of these recipes in American farm cooking was that you could take a relatively small amount of food and stretch it to serve an entire family.

I believe these are the same dumplings that are in a wide range of classic Shore soups, like peas and dumplings, lima and dumplings or beef and dumplings. Now that we have the dumpling recipe we’re going to see if these perfect those other dishes too. Photos will have to come later, because we’re having trouble uploading them for now.

Ingredients

• Whole chicken, 8-9 lbs
• At least 6 cups flour
• 3 tbsp salt
• quart chicken broth
• 8 tbsp shortening

Instructions

1. Season outside of chicken with salt and pepper, place in roasting dish, add 2qts water to pan, cover and bake until done
2. Transfer chicken to a cutting board to cool a little bit (or a casserole dish works well for this) and strain the remaining water into a soup pot
3. Pick chicken meat from bones. (Discard the bones or keep them to replenish your supply of stock)
4. One chicken won’t make enough broth, so add an extra quart of stock to your soup pot, and keep covered on a low simmer. Add a couple extra bullion cubes. If you taste the broth at this stage it should be slightly saltier than the broth in a chicken noodle soup.
5. In a large bowl, mix about 5 cups of flour and 2-3 tbsp of salt. It’s really quite a bit of salt in this step too.
6. Add about 8 tbsp of shortening, combine with hands. When the consistency is right, it will clump up when you squeeze it and then crumble when you release.
7. Add hot water about 1/4 cup at a time and work in with your hands. Probably only about 3/4 cups of water until it started to take on a consistency like a gooey bread dough
8. Knead, adding flour, until the dough is fairly firm and non-sticky. Knead pretty heavily, about 5 minutes. Almost more like a pizza dough consistency at this point.
9. Cover your rolling surface with a generous amount of flour.
10. Break off about 1/6 of the dough, sprinkle with flour, and roll it out to about 1/4 inch thick.
11. Pick up the dough, reflour the rolling surface, and flip it over
12. Roll the dough as thin as you can without it breaking or tearing, less than 1/8 inch thick. A single cup of dough should roll out to about a 16×16 square or even a bit larger.
13. Cut the dough into rectangles about 2×3 inches. Flour the surface of the dough one more time (so the dumplings don’t stick together)
14. Repeat until all the dough is used up.
15. Bring the broth back to a rolling boil
16. Add the dumplings in small batches, stirring constantly so they don’t clump together, and stirring along the bottom of the soup pot so nothing sticks to it
17. Once all the dumplings are added, reduce to a simmer, and let cook for about 10 minutes.
18. Apparently, this was traditionally served with both mashed potatoes and bread. You can skip the bread these days (we’re all watching our carbs) but you can’t skip the mashed potatoes.

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