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Dumplings for Soups and Stews

Bread dumplings made from soaked dried bread, flour, eggs, butter, and optional meat, onion, herbs, cooked in soup or fried.

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 ↓

Dumplings for Soups and Stews

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Soak the hard dried bread in cold water until softened, then press dry in a cloth and crumble it.

  2. In a bowl, mix the crumbled bread with chopped cooked meat or fish, flour, salt, pepper, butter, chopped onion, and herbs.

  3. Add 1 egg for each cup of the mixture and mix lightly.

  4. Form the mixture into small balls.

Cook

  1. Cook the dumplings in gently boiling soup.

  2. Test one dumpling to ensure it holds together.

  3. If it does not hold, add a little flour.

  4. Alternatively, fry the dumplings in a pan or bake them.

  5. For a variation, soak the bread in milk and water.

  6. Mix with the other ingredients to form balls.

  7. Cook covered for 15 minutes.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Hard dried bread
Forms the bulk of the dumpling and absorbs liquid to give body.
All-purpose flour
Helps the crumbs bind so the dumplings hold their shape.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as the dumplings cook, firming their shape.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender crumb.
Milk
Moistens the bread so the mixture stays tender and cohesive.

The step that matters

Keep the liquid at a gentle simmer. Vigorous boiling can break soft dumplings apart. Gentle heat lets the egg and starch set slowly into a firm, intact shape.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, flour, egg, butter, milk, meat):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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