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Dumplings for the Above Soup

Dumplings made from flour, lard, salt, and cold water, boiled in soup and thickened with flour and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,481 recipes. Both carry acetaldehyde, which smells pungent, ethereal. The science ↓

Dumplings for the Above Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, lard, and salt.

  2. Add cold water gradually until a dough forms.

  3. Roll the dough thin and cut it into small pieces.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the dumplings to the soup and let them boil for about 20 minutes.

  2. In a separate bowl, thicken the soup with 1 tablespoon of flour and cream.

  3. Boil the soup once more and serve.

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 + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the dough's structure and thickens the soup with the gluten and starch it provides.
Lard
Adds fat that makes the dough tender and short rather than tough.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the soup as it thickens.

The step that matters

Add cold water gradually until a dough forms. Adding water slowly lets the flour absorb it evenly. Too much at once makes a sticky, uneven dough that is hard to roll thin, and it may toughen once cooked.

“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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