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Dessert

Cherry Dumplings

Steamed dumplings made with cherries, flour, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine cherries with enough water in a pot to create plenty of juice and sweeten to taste.

  2. Mix flour, salt, and baking powder in a bowl.

  3. Add enough milk to the flour mixture to create a batter that can be stirred with a fork.

Cook and steam

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the boiling cherries.

  2. Cover and steam for about 10 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Cherries
Provide the fruit base and juice that the dumplings cook in and absorb flavour from.
Flour
Forms the batter structure that sets into the body of each dumpling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the dumplings rise and turn light.
Milk
Moistens the flour into a batter with enough liquid to hold its shape.
Sugar
Sweetens the cherry juice to taste.

The step that matters

Drop the batter into boiling cherries and cover. The batter needs to go into actively boiling liquid and the pot must stay covered so steam cooks the dumplings through. Lifting the lid or letting the liquid drop lets the tops stay raw and dense.

“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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