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Dessert

Baked Cherry Dumplings

A baked dumpling made with flour, shortening, milk, cherries, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Baked Cherry Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Rub the cottolene into the salted flour until crumbly.

  3. Add the milk and mix to form a dough.

  4. Roll the dough into a sheet about ¼ inch thick and cut into 4-inch squares.

Fill and shape

  1. Place 2 tablespoons of cherries in the center of each square and sprinkle with sugar.

  2. Fold the edges of the dough over the cherries and pinch to seal.

  3. Place the dumplings seam-side down on a floured baking pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for 30 minutes or until browned.

  2. Serve hot with a sauce of your choice.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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 dough's structure, setting firm walls around the cherry filling as it bakes.
Cottolene
Rubbed into the flour, it coats flour particles and makes the dough short and tender.
Fresh milk
Hydrates the flour so it forms a cohesive dough and adds moisture and browning through milk sugars.
Stoned cherries
Release juice as they heat, moistening the filling and adding tart flavor against the sweet sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the cherries and promotes browning on the dumpling surface.

The step that matters

Pinch the edges to seal the dumplings. If the seams are not sealed tightly, cherry juice escapes and boils out during baking, leaving the filling dry and the dough soggy or open.

“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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