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Appalachia · 1862 AD · The Winter of Chickamauga

Instant Pot Chicken and Dumplings

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Instant Pot Chicken and Dumplings
Appalachia · 1862 AD · The Winter of Chickamauga

The Widow's Pot

In the winter of 1862, with the Confederate and Union armies maneuvering through the Tennessee mountains, the women of the Appalachian farming communities were left to feed their households on whatever remained after the armies had passed through and taken what they needed. A letter preserved in the Tennessee State Archives, written by a woman named Sarah Alderman of Bradley County to her sister in Virginia, describes the meal she had learned to prepare from her grandmother and now cooked weekly through that terrible winter. She called it simply the pot. A chicken — whatever could be caught or was too old to lay — simmered in water with onion and celery until the meat fell from the bone. The broth, enriched with a spoonful of lard, received dumplings of flour and buttermilk dropped in by the spoonful, where they swelled and absorbed the chicken fat and became something between a bread and a noodle. It required nothing more. It fed six or eight people from a single bird. Sarah's letter notes that she had learned to seal the pot with a tight-fitting lid and weigh it down with a flat stone, which built a modest pressure and accelerated the dumpling cooking by several minutes — an intuitive discovery of the pressure-cooking principle a century before the Instant Pot made it commonplace. The modern version honors her ingenuity.
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Ingredients

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup whole milk, at room temperature
1 small onion, chopped
2 medium celery stalks, chopped
2 medium carrots, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup frozen peas
1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Method

I

Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a small skillet on the stovetop or in the microwave.

II

Mix together the baking powder, 1 3/4 cups flour and a pinch of salt in a medium bowl. Stir in the milk and melted butter until well combined. Set the dough aside.

III

Set a 6-quart Instant Pot® to saute (see Cook's Note). Add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter and melt, stirring constantly so it doesn't burn, about 1 minute. Add the onion, celery, carrots and a pinch of salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until translucent and softened, 3 to 4 minutes. Add the garlic and cook until softened, 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in the thyme and remaining 2 tablespoons flour until well combined, about 1 minute. Pour in the chicken stock and wine and stir. Add the chicken, peas, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt and a few grinds of black pepper and turn the pot off.

IV

Carefully drop the dough in 2-tablespoon-sized mounds into the pot, spacing evenly (you should have about 9 dumplings). Follow the manufacturer's guide for locking the lid and preparing to cook. Set the pot to pressure cook on high for 3 minutes. After the pressure cook cycle is complete, follow the manufacturer's guide for quick release and wait until the quick release cycle is complete. Be careful of any remaining steam and unlock and remove the lid. Spoon the dumplings and soup into bowls and sprinkle with the parsley.