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Dessert

Lemon Dumplings

Lemon dumplings are small cakes made from bread crumbs, suet, powdered sugar, lemon juice, zest, and egg, boiled and served with maple syrup and honey.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lemon Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dumplings

  1. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, chopped suet, powdered sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, and egg. Mix until well combined.

  2. Form the mixture into dumplings.

  3. Place dumplings in a buttered paper bag.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook in boiling water for 10 minutes.

  2. Serve with maple syrup and honey.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Butter + honeytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,327 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Maple syrup + honeytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together222 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Bread + honeytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Provide the bulk that holds the dumpling together.
Chopped suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings moist and tender while cooking.
Egg
Binds the mixture so the dumplings hold their shape.
Lemon zest
Adds aromatic lemon flavor from the peel's oils.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, egg, butter, maple syrup, honey):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, egg, butter, maple syrup, honey. 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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