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Dessert

Boiled Cherry Dumplings

A sweet dumpling made from bread sponge, egg, sugar, and lard, boiled in cherries and sugar water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Cherry Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make and rise the dough

  1. Combine the bread sponge, egg, ½ cup sugar, and lard in a bowl; knead well, adding a little flour as needed.

  2. Let the dough rise for 2 hours.

  3. Shape the dough into dumplings and let them rise for another 2 hours.

Boil the dumplings

  1. Bring the cherries, water, and ½ cup sugar to a boil in a pot.

  2. Drop the dumplings into the boiling mixture and boil for 30 minutes, keeping the lid on.

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

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

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Bread sponge
Fermented starter that makes the dough rise and gives it a soft, airy crumb.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness that helps the dumplings hold together.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and keeps the dumplings soft.
Flour
Provides structure as the dough is kneaded and shaped.
Cherries
Supply fruit flavour, tartness and juice that become the cooking liquid.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and the cherry liquid.

The step that matters

Second rise before boiling. The dumplings rely on yeast gas trapped in the dough to become light. Under-proofed dumplings stay dense, while over-proofed ones can collapse in the boiling liquid, so the rise should be allowed to finish but not run too long.

“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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