Chicken and Dumplings For Christmas

Chicken and Dumplings, recipes below

Making dumplings represented a creative way people have used for centuries to utilize scraps from the production of biscuits and breads to fill the stomachs of a large family and one practiced across the world.  The tradition came up in interviews I did with southerners and the children of southerners who grew up in northern cities. A case in point is that Ruth Thorpe Miller’s mother from Savannah, made chicken ’n’ dumplings for Christmas long after migrating to Harlem in the 1920s. Similarly my great aunt Maggie White from Windsor, North Carolina migrated to Ossining, New York, in Westchester County, 30 minutes north of New York City. During the Great Depression she kept her “big boned” children filled with chicken ’n’ dumplings during the holidays. And Joyce White tell us that in the 1940s, Christmas as a child in Alabama would be filled with the “warming aroma of Chicken ’n’ Dumplings, which was made with a big hen,” in her mom’s kitchen. Below are some chicken ’n’ Dumpling recipes. Please share your dumpling stories from your childhood in the comment section below. I know that many people have them and I and others read them  with great interest. 


Traditional Chicken ’n’ Dumpling Recipe: http://www.ifood.tv/network/chicken_dumplings_southern_style/recipes


Vegan Chicken ’n’ Dumpling Recipe: http://veganchicksrock.blogspot.com/2007/10/vegan-chicken-and-dumplings.html