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Dessert

Little Currant Dumplings

A small dumpling made with flour, beef suet, currants, egg, and milk or water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,759 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Little Currant Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dumplings

  1. In a bowl, combine flour, chopped suet, salt, and currants.

  2. Add the egg and enough milk or water to achieve a drop biscuit consistency.

  3. Spoon a tablespoon of the mixture into dumpling cloths.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the dumplings for 45 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once bound with liquid.
Fresh beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings tender and moist as they cook.
Egg
Binds the dough together and adds richness to the dumplings.
Zante currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the dough.

The step that matters

Adding the milk or water. Too much liquid makes the dough slack and the dumplings may fall apart in the boil, while too little leaves them dry and crumbly. Aim for a drop biscuit consistency, which holds its shape when spooned.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, egg, milk. 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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