Québécoise food has some very strange names, for example: pets de soeur (nun’s farts), poudding chômeur (pudding of the unemployed) and grand-père dans le sirop (grand father in syrup). No, I am not making any of this up. Strangely enough all of these things are desserts, maybe the first settlers were a little bit nuts due to being cooped up in their cabins during the winter when they decided to name their desserts? Anyways, most traditional Quebecoise food is rather plain, and sometimes, dare I say it? Bland. But then again I love spicy food and of course they were rather short on spices in Nouvelle-France. They basically had snow and maple syrup. While the main courses are heavy on meat and potatoes, the desserts are heavy on carbs, maple syrup, brown sugar and cream. My kind of food.
This recipe is for maple syrup dumplings (i.e. grand father in syrup). Poor grandfather, wonder what he did to end up dunked in syrup? You can find a recipe here. It isn’t the one that I used but it is pretty close.
Depending on where you live in the world this recipe might either strike you as being pretty expensive or pretty cheap. I suppose living in Canada one gets used to maple syrup being relatively inexpensive. In other parts of the world it is pretty pricey. In the pot above there aew roughly 1 1/2 cups of maple syrup along with some water. This was put to boil while I made the dumplings.
The dumplings are ridiculously easy, especially if you have a food processor. You basically cut butter into a mixture of flour, baking powder, a bit of sugar and a dash of salt. Once that is done you add in enough milk to make a batter. All of this takes 5 minutes, tops.
The batter actually cooks in the boiling syrup so with a small spoon I scooped out small dumplings, roughly 1-2 tablespoons each.
Here they are merrily cooking away.
After 15 minutes I gently flipped over the dumplings so that the other side could cook properly and get its share of maple syrup and let them cook for a few minutes more.
All done!
This was pretty good. The dumpling soaked up the syrup and they were perfect with some ice cream. Next time I will double the sauce component so that there is more left over after everything is cooked. Simple, quick and tasty, it is hard not to like this recipe.
