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Dumplings Foe Soups Akd Stews

Bread dumplings made from soaked, crumbled bread, flour, egg, butter, milk, water, and seasonings, cooked in soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 Foe Soups Akd Stews

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Soak the hard dried bread in cold water until softened, then press dry in a cloth and crumble it.

  2. Mix the crumbled bread with flour, salt, pepper, chopped suet or marrow, chopped onion, herbs, and one egg.

  3. Form the mixture into small balls.

Cook

  1. Cook the balls in gently boiling soup.

  2. Test one first to ensure it holds together; if not, add a little flour.

  3. These dumplings can also be fried in a pan or baked.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 body of the dumplings and absorbs liquid.
Flour
Adds starch that binds the crumbs so the dumplings hold their shape.
Egg
Binds the mixture together and helps the dumplings set when cooked.
Suet or marrow
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings moist and tender as they cook.

The step that matters

Testing one dumpling before cooking the rest. If the mixture is too wet or loose, the dumplings break apart in the simmering liquid. Cooking a test piece shows whether the binding is right, and a little extra flour fixes a loose mix before the whole batch goes in.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, egg, butter, milk, pepper. 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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