Her name was Evelyn Baldridge, but to me, she was Grandma B. I was lucky enough to know her for almost 13 years, which meant when she died, I was just old enough to understand how different she was from almost every other old lady I’d ever met. For starters, she never in all her 95 years seemed particularly old. She couldn’t drive or swim. She didn’t have a husband, and though she’d had one once, I understood that was a problem she’d fixed right around the time the Great Depression hit. She lived in a house in Farmington, Mo., the size of a woodshed, where my dad’s high school portrait was the featured piece of artwork and the curtains smelled like bacon grease.
Grandma B was always frying something: bacon or chicken or occasionally squirrel. Mornings, she would disappear into a cloud of flour and emerge with biscuits while a pot of gravy bubbled on the ancient stove. Breakfast stretched into lunchtime, and then maybe, if I was lucky, she’d spend the afternoon making chicken and dumplings.
It was the one dish she made that I truly enjoyed. I was not a little girl who would gnaw a crispy chicken leg down to the bone. I was scared of dark meat, of cartilage, of accidentally nibbling something I should not. Gravy, with all its flecks and specks and who-knows-what, made me shudder. But chicken and dumplings? I’d scoop seconds.
Grandma B died 24 years ago, and as the time without her stretches on, I’ve developed more than a few regrets about my not-eating habits, in large part because many of her best meals died with her. Grandma cooked without recipes, pinching and heaping and eyeballing. She made do with what she had, and she rarely let anyone help.
My mom, though, was smart enough to watch, and after Grandma died, she started making chicken and dumplings on special occasions. It was a labor-intensive process: boiling the bird, shredding the meat, skimming fat off the stock and rolling the dough for the rectangular, noodle-like dumplings. I was too busy growing up to learn all the tricks, and eventually we got too busy as a family for a dinner that took half the afternoon to cook.
So when I asked my mom this winter if she might help me re-create the recipe, she laughed. She jotted down some instructions, which were very much in the spirit of Grandma B’s approach to cooking. As in, they were vague: Get a chicken, bring out the flour canister, stock up on butter; ready, set, go.
My first attempt was a mess. My dumplings — just flour, stock and an egg — turned to glue upon chewing, and a whole boiled chicken was excessive (and messy). The dish needed color, and it was thin, soupy. Enter carrots and leeks and a buttery roux to give the broth some body. I swapped an entire bird with bone-in, skin-on breasts, and in what felt like a stroke of yuppie sacrilege, I decided to make the dumplings along the lines of a French pâte à choux (the base for cream puffs, éclairs and more), melting butter with stock, adding flour, cooking the mixture down and then beating in an egg. With every new iteration, I managed to up the flavor (and the richness), and I could feel myself getting closer.
By my fourth or fifth try, my chicken and dumplings were good, but they weren’t Grandma’s. I was stumped — until I recalled the smell that hung like a cloud in her kitchen. Bacon fat. I thought about the little tin she kept in her fridge, how she’d let the fat cool in her cast iron skillet and then pour it in the tin, each day another layer of rich, flavor-packed, glorified grease.
Grandma, I realized, made hundreds of vats of chicken and dumplings across nearly a century of change and catastrophe and shifting trends: rationing, inflation, Crisco, margarine. And through it all, Grandma fried bacon. The key to chicken and dumplings lay in that ancient tin.
It was a simple switch, trading butter for bacon fat in the roux, and as soon as the steam hit my nose, I knew I’d hit home. Finally, my chicken and dumplings tasted like her chicken and dumplings, and my kitchen smelled like one I can barely remember, a thousand miles and 24 years away.
