Skip to main content
Main

Foam Dumplings

A light dumpling made from egg yolks, flour, salt, and egg whites, cooked in boiling soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Foam Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Stir egg yolks, flour, and salt until well mixed.

  2. Gently fold in beaten egg whites.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour mixture into boiling soup.

  2. Cover and boil for 4 to 5 minutes.

  3. Turn the dumplings with a skimming spoon.

  4. Boil again.

  5. Lift them out.

  6. Cut the dumplings into small squares.

  7. Return them to the soup before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 whites
Beaten whites trap air, giving the dumplings their light, foamy texture.
Egg yolks
Bind the mixture and add richness and structure as the dumplings set.
Flour
Provides a little structure so the dumplings hold together in the soup.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites. Stirring or deflating the foam makes the dumplings dense instead of light.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes