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Potato Dumplings

A dish of boiled potato dumplings made with grated stale bread, butter, eggs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Potato Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes in their jackets the day before.

  2. Peel and grate the potatoes.

Make and cook the dumplings

  1. Add the grated bread, melted butter or suet, salt, flour, nutmeg, lemon peel, eggs, and browned diced bread.

  2. Mix all ingredients thoroughly and form into round dumplings.

  3. Place the dumplings in boiling salted water and cook until they float to the top.

  4. Test one dumpling for doneness; if cooked through, remove all dumplings.

Serve

  1. Serve with fruit sauce, heated fat with finely chopped browned onion, or a sweet and sour 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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the dumpling, giving a starchy, tender body once cooked and grated.
Eggs
Bind the mixture so the dumplings hold their shape during boiling.
Stale bread
Absorbs moisture and adds body, helping the dumplings hold together.
Butter or suet
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender texture.
Flour
Helps absorb moisture and firm up the dough so it can be shaped.

The step that matters

Test one dumpling for doneness. Cooking dumplings in boiling water until they float may not mean they are cooked through. Cutting or tasting a test dumpling confirms the centre is done before removing the batch.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, flour, nutmeg, lemon, egg. 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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