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Boiled Potato Dumplings

A boiled dumpling made from mashed potatoes, eggs, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Potato Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil and mash the potatoes well.

  2. Add the eggs and salt, then mix thoroughly.

  3. Sift the flour onto a board and place the potato mixture in it.

  4. Work the mixture for about 10 minutes, adding more flour if necessary to make a stiff dough.

Shape and cook

  1. Shape the dough into dumplings.

  2. Drop the dumplings into boiling salted water and boil for 20 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. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

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

Potatoes
Provide the bulk of the dough and moisture and starch that give the dumplings their soft body.
Eggs
Bind the mashed potato together so the dumplings hold their shape.
Flour
Adds structure, and the amount worked in sets how firm and stiff the dough becomes.

The step that matters

Adding flour to reach a stiff dough. Flour should be added gradually until the dough is stiff enough to shape. Too little flour leaves dumplings that fall apart in the water, while too much or overworking develops gluten and makes them dense and tough.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour. 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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