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Delicious Dumplings for Meat

A batter of egg, milk, butter, and flour is dropped into boiling meat to make dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Delicious Dumplings for Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine the beaten egg, salt, sugar, sweet milk, and soft butter.

  2. Sift in the baking powder and flour, mixing until you have a stiff batter.

Cook the dumplings

  1. Drop tablespoonfuls of the batter into a kettle of boiling meat.

  2. Cook for 8 minutes without allowing steam to escape.

Serve leftovers

  1. For leftovers, slice and fry in a little butter to serve with a sweet.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure to the dumplings as they cook.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the dumplings rise and turn light.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the batter so the dumplings hold their shape.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the batter.
Sweet milk
Moistens the batter and helps it bind into a stiff dough.

The step that matters

Cook for 8 minutes without allowing steam to escape. Steam trapped under the lid cooks and lifts the dumplings. If steam escapes, the drop in heat and pressure can leave them dense and heavy.

“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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