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Raw Potato Dumplings

A dough of grated potatoes, eggs, flour, baking powder, and salt is boiled to make dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Raw Potato Dumplings

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Grate the potatoes and drain off the water.

  2. Add the beaten eggs to the potatoes.

  3. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together.

  4. Combine the dry ingredients with the potato mixture and add enough flour to form a stiff dough.

  5. Form the dough into dumplings.

Boil and serve

  1. Drop the dumplings into salted boiling water.

  2. Boil for 15 to 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 starch and moisture that give the dumplings their body.
Eggs
Bind the grated potato so the dough holds its shape.
Flour
Adds structure, absorbing moisture to form a stiff dough that holds together in boiling water.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the dumplings and helps them rise.

The step that matters

Forming the stiff dough. Grated potato releases water, so enough flour must be added to make a stiff dough. Too little flour leaves dumplings that fall apart or turn gummy in the boiling water.

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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