Name: Marrow Dumplings for Soup
Ingredients: ½ cup beef marrow; 1 egg; ¼ teaspoon salt; cracker crumbs

Why it works: Beef and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,305 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Marrow Dumplings for Soup

Ingredients

½ cup beef marrow
1 egg
¼ teaspoon salt
cracker crumbs

Directions

Prepare the dumplings

Mash the beef marrow in a bowl.
Add the egg and salt, then stir well.
Stir in enough cracker crumbs to form small balls.

Cook

Drop the balls into broth and boil for five 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.

Beef + eggtop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef marrow: Adds fat and richness, and keeps the dumplings moist.
Egg: Binds the mixture together and helps the dumplings hold their shape.
Cracker crumbs: Absorb moisture and give the mixture body so it can be shaped into balls.

“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.