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Blueberry Dumpling

A steamed blueberry dumpling served with a sweet lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Blueberry Dumpling

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dumpling

  1. Mix baking powder with flour in a bowl.

  2. Add blueberries and salt, then mix with cold water until the consistency is like cake batter.

  3. Steam the mixture for 2 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, boil hot water and sugar together.

  2. Dissolve cornstarch in sweet milk, then add to the boiling mixture and cook for 1 minute.

  3. Stir in butter and flavor with lemon.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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 structure of the dumpling batter as it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas as the batter heats, helping the dumpling rise and turn light.
Blueberries
Add pockets of fruit flavor and juice that colour the dumpling batter.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the boiling liquid.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps give it body.

The step that matters

Dissolve cornstarch in sweet milk before adding it to the boiling mixture. Cornstarch clumps if it hits hot liquid dry. Dissolving it in cold liquid first lets the starch disperse, so when the sauce boils it thickens smoothly instead of lumpy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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