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Dumplings for Soups and Stews

A mixture of soaked bread, meat, suet or butter, onion, herbs, and egg formed into balls and cooked in soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Dumplings for Soups and Stews

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Soak the hard dried bread in cold water until softened.

  2. Press the soaked bread dry in a cloth and crumble it.

Mix and shape

  1. Mix the crumbled bread with the chopped meat, suet or butter, onion, herbs, salt, and pepper.

  2. Add one egg to the mixture and mix lightly.

  3. Form the mixture into small balls.

Cook

  1. Cook the dumplings in gently boiling soup, testing one first to ensure it holds together. If it doesn't, add a little flour.

  2. Alternatively, you can fry the mixture in a pan or bake it.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

Hard dried bread
Soaked and crumbled, it forms the bulk and light body of the dumplings.
Egg
Binds the mixture so the dumplings hold their shape while cooking.
Suet or butter
Adds fat, which keeps the dumplings moist and tender as they cook.
Cooked meat
Adds savoury flavour and substance to the dumplings.

The step that matters

Testing one dumpling before cooking the batch. Mixtures with too much moisture or too little binder can fall apart in liquid. A test dumpling shows whether the mixture holds together, and a little flour can then fix it.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, meat, egg, butter, pepper, 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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