I was a Norfolk Dumpling

I may have been born in Lancashire, and returned here in my twenties to work, but brought up in Norfolk I still feel that is my spiritual home. Thus the national dish of the Norfolker (say that in a hurry and cause consternation) is one to which I return as regularly as mutinous family and culinary pride will allow. That dish is of course the Norfolk Dumpling.

Dumplings of all sorts are definitely austerity fare: filling, cheap, and essentially satisfying. They are rarely subtle, though if you give them a French or Russian name they can seem a bit more exotic. Few words can be as demotic as dumpling, although if you think of the word as the gerund of the verb to dumple, which it isn't, some interest could be engendered.

The Norfolk Dumpling (which merits capitals) is very simply made if you have a bread-maker, which I do, as it is just bread dough allowed to rise then dropped into salted boiling water to bobble about and cook for 15 to 20 minutes. They are rarely light, for which read never, the surface takes on the appearance of wallpaper paste, and even if you include a flavouring like yesterday's dried sage they still taste predominantly of being full. But as that is their point, job done.

In my hometown, the seaside resort of Great Yarmouth, clever and careful guest house landladies would serve them at least three times in a week's stay, anything more frequent risking violence. A few pence worth of flour, a bit of fat, some yeast, salt and sugar, and plenty of elbow grease was/is what they cost.

Yet they enhance a stew wonderfully, once broken into soaking up the gravy like a sponge. Or like the bread they are. And the secret to them is not to cut the things, which crushes them and creates a lump of goo, but to pull them apart with two forks. Simple, as is the dumpling.