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Dessert

Lemon Dumplinos

Lemon dumplings are small dough balls flavored with lemon juice, rind, and suet, boiled and served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Dumplinos

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, sugar, lemon juice, grated lemon rind, and chopped suet.

  2. Add just enough water to form a dough.

  3. Shape the mixture into six dumplings.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the dumplings in water for one hour.

  2. Serve immediately with melted butter sweetened to taste and the grated rind of one lemon, or any sweet 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Forms the dough structure that holds the dumplings together while they boil.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings tender and moist as they cook.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the dough brown slightly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour to the dough.

The step that matters

Add just enough water to form a dough. Too much water makes the dough slack, so the dumplings can fall apart in the boiling water. Too little leaves a dry, crumbly mixture that will not hold its shape.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, sauce):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, sauce. 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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