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Meat Dumplings

A dish of minced meat wrapped in dough and steamed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Meat Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove all bone, gristle, and skin from the meat.

  2. Mix the meat with onion, green chili, celery, and season with salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.

Make and steam the dumplings

  1. Leaven the flour with yeast or baking powder.

  2. Roll the dough to ¼ inch thick.

  3. Wrap a tablespoon of the mixture in the dough.

  4. Steam the wrapped dumpling for about 1 hour.

  5. Steam the spongy dumpling until it expands to double thickness.

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Meat + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Meat + celerytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,880 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Provides the savory filling that is the main substance of each dumpling.
Dough
Encloses the filling and sets into a wrapper when steamed.
Yeast or baking powder
Releases gas in the spongy dough so it rises and expands during steaming.

The step that matters

Steam the spongy dumpling until it expands to double thickness. Steam is what sets the dough, so under-steaming leaves the dumpling dense and gummy. Yeast or baking powder needs time and heat to produce gas and lift the dough, so the expansion is the signal that it is cooked through.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, onion, pepper, sauce):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, onion, pepper, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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