Welcome Autumn: How to make blackberry dumplings

To welcome autumn today, my sons and I are planning our own little at-home harvest festival, complete with a variety of cool-weather foods. We started the day off with a pan of my favorite blackberry dumplings.

My parents can’t seem to agree on where this recipe came from. My mom swears she got it from my dad’s grandma, Wilma Webster. My dad insists he never ate blackberry dumplings as a kid, so the recipe had to have come from my mom’s family. Either way, this has been a favorite recipe in my family throughout my entire life.

When I was a kid, my parents would bundle us up in long sleeves and long pants on some of the hottest days of summer. They dragged us out into the woods and shoved us into endless blackberry brambles where we would pick (and eat) until our plastic ice cream buckets were full and our hands were soaked with blackberry juice.

At home, our mom made blackberry pies and cobblers until we were sick of them. We froze the rest of the blackberries for winter when we would pull them out on a Saturday evening to thaw for the next morning. Blackberry dumplings were a favorite breakfast for a cold winter morning.

Today, as soon as the weather turns crisp, I begin to yearn for those favorite family cold weather recipes.

Blackberry Dumpling Recipe

Dumplings

1 ½ cup flour

2 tsp baking powder

3 tsp vegetable oil*

¾ cup milk

Mix dumpling ingredients and set aside.

Blackberry sauce

1 cup boiling water

3 cups blackberries

2/3 to 1 cup of sugar to taste

½ tsp butter

1 tsp cinnamon

Mix blackberry sauce ingredients in a large pot on the stove top. Bring mixture to boil. Drop dumpling mixture by spoonfuls into the blackberry sauce. Cook, uncovered, over medium heat for 10 minutes. Then cover and cook an additional 10 minutes. Serve warm.

*The original recipe calls for solid lard, but I don’t even know where I would get lard these days.