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Cherry Dumplings

A baked pastry filled with cherries and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Rub the lard into the salted flour.

  3. Add the milk and mix to form a dough.

  4. Roll the dough into a sheet ¼ inch thick and cut into squares.

Fill and shape

  1. Place 2 tablespoons of cherries in the center of each square and sprinkle with sugar.

  2. Fold up the edges of the dough and pinch them together.

  3. Place the dumplings seam-side down on a floured baking pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for 30 minutes or until browned.

  2. Serve hot with a good sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Prepared flour
Forms the dough's structure once hydrated and worked into gluten.
Lard
Fat coats flour particles, shortening gluten for a tender, flaky texture.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form the dough and adds milk sugars that help browning.
Stoned cherries
Provide moisture and tart fruit flavor that fills the dumplings as they bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the cherries and helps the dumpling tops brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Pinch the dough edges fully closed. Sealing the edges keeps cherry juice inside while baking. Leaking juice can scorch on the pan and leave the dumplings drier and less evenly cooked.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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