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Dessert

Lemon Dumplings

Lemon dumplings are small meatballs made from beef suet, bread crumbs, sugar, lemon, egg, and milk, boiled and served with a lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Lemon Dumplings

6 dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dumplings

  1. Mix the beef suet and bread crumbs in a bowl.

  2. Add the sugar, lemon rind, lemon juice, beaten egg, and milk. Mix thoroughly.

  3. Divide the mixture into 6 equal parts.

  4. Place each part into a small buttered cup and tie it in a cloth.

  5. Boil the cups quickly for about 1 hour until cooked through.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, boil the sugar, lemon rind, lemon juice, and water until the sugar dissolves.

  2. Serve the dumplings hot with the sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings moist and tender as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Provides the bulk and structure that holds the dumplings together.
Beaten egg
Binds the mixture and helps it set firm when cooked.
Milk
Moistens the crumbs so the mixture holds together and softens.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the dumplings and sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the cups quickly for about 1 hour. The dumplings must be boiling steadily so they cook through; a weak simmer leaves them heavy or undercooked in the centre, and the cloth must stay secure so water does not get in.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, bread, sugar, egg, milk, sauce, sherry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, bread, sugar, egg, milk, sauce, sherry. 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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