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Dessert

Lemon Dumplings

Lemon dumplings are small, boiled sweet cakes made from bread crumbs, suet, sugar, lemon rind, eggs, and lemon juice, served with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lemon Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the grated bread crumbs, chopped suet, moist sugar, salt, flour, and grated lemon rind together in a bowl.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and strained lemon juice to the mixture, stirring well.

  3. Grease small cups with butter and fill them with the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Tie a cloth dipped in flour over the cups and boil for 45 minutes.

  2. Turn the dumplings out onto a dish, sprinkle with sifted sugar, and serve with wine 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the dumpling and give it a soft, absorbent body.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the dumplings moist as they cook.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help it set firm when cooked.
Moist sugar
Sweetens the dumplings and adds a slight molasses flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth over the cups. The floured cloth must be tied snugly so steam cannot escape and the dumplings cook through evenly while the mixture stays moist and holds its shape.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, flour, egg, butter):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, flour, egg, butter. 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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