Plum Dumplings

I just finished making a batch of an old Muehlhausen family favorite, plum dumplings - only with free-stone apricots rather than the usual small Italian prune-plums that are in season only for a miniscule window of time in late summer.

I’ve missed that little peek-hole-of-a-window for the last 2 or 3 years, and consequently poor Fritz has stuck his bottom lip out in disappointment each August and done without any. But today, while he’s laboring and sweating blood over his Purdue writing project (he just lost a couple of pages of inspired composition to the cyber-goblins), and while remodel work is stalled at the Buck Creek house since he’s not there to help find some important papers, I decided to cheer him up as best I could. Food usually works wonders on his dejected spirits…so…apricot dumplings to the rescue.

Historically, plum dumplings came into the family as an art form via Fritz’s grandmother, Minnie Muehlhausen (her Hungarian maiden name was Hermine Mitris). Of course there was no written recipe – a few potatoes, a big egg or two pullet eggs, an overflowing cup of flour. Grandmother’s plum dumplings were a Very Big Deal when Fritz and his siblings were kids; evidently they’d fight over the equitable distribution of this rather odd and very heavy-on-the-starch and light-on-the-sugar dessert.

Not long before she passed away, I asked Grandmother if she’d teach me her craft. She agreed, and we met at the Barnes cottage on the west shore of Maxinkuckee. “Yoous take zee potatoes, zee small but not too small ones, like zees.” She pulled three small-to-medium potatoes from the sack. “Yoous boil them…skins on…until veeer-ly soft.”

Grandmother was a woman of few words, but her facial expressions could be quite stern and penetrating, and therefore carried a lot of weight. I was always just barely afraid of Grandmother for this reason, and yet intuitively I knew her bark was worse than her bite.

Our session was mostly a chance for me to stand on the observation deck next to her housedress-clad, stout little body and watch – although she verbally punctuated the specific techniques imperative to success. I could tell she loved being on center stage with the floodlights blaring. After boiling the potatoes, she rinsed them briefly with cold water, removed the skins, and began smashing them with a dinner fork on a meat platter. “Use zee beeg plate and zee fork to mash. And then cool – must be verrrr-ly cold before adding flour.” I scribbled down some scratchy chicken-track notes that I later condensed onto a recipe card, although most of the process remained stored in my head.

To make a long story short, we spent an entire afternoon making potato dough, encasing “8 or 9 plums – it depends on zee size” with the dough, boiling the resulting dumplings in a big pot of roiling water until just the faintest hint of purple juice started to leak, and then dousing them with browned cracker (originally in Hungary, dry bread) crumbs. It was truly a ceremonious event, and every step took at least three times as long as necessary – which was, after all, the way to savor the job as primarily a relational experience. As far as I know, I’m the only one in the family who studied under Grandmother’s mentorship, but thirty-some years later her plum dumpling legacy is safe with me.

Grandmother lived long enough to see our first child, John, only once. She held him very tightly (holding babies, like everything else, was serious business) while sitting at the Barnes cottage kitchen table, and said nothing. Only when he began nuzzling her and fussing did she mumble, “Yoous out of luck for eating from the Grandmother. I have nothings for you in here.” This was said while patting her chest. “Yoous better go to your mama.”

Meanwhile, someday I hope to introduce John’s children, and Grandmother’s other great-great-grandchildren, to plum dumplings: a homespun tradition that deserves to live on. Maybe someday Clara or Josie, or some other still-unborn granddaughter, will stand at my side and we’ll make Hungarian plum dumplings “like zees.”