Today let’s explore women's history through chicken dumpling (also spelled “Chicken ’n’ Dumplings). Sources reveal that West African women prepared chicken together with collard greens and dumplings many centuries ago. The tradition survived the Atlantic slave trade, slavery, and sharecropping with mention of it in the oral histories I conducted. For example, Ruth Thorpe Miller’s mother from Savannah made chicken ’n’ dumplings long after migrating to Harlem in the 1920s. 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. As a child in in 1940s Alabama, Joyce White recalls the smell of her mother cooking Chicken ’n’ Dumplings, “which was made with a big hen.” Here are some Chicken ’n’ Dumpling recipes below.
