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Light Flour Dumplings

Light flour dumplings made with butter, egg, parsley, and nutmeg, boiled in soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,062 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Light Flour Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Add the whole egg, egg yolk, salt, nutmeg, parsley, and flour.

  3. Stir well for several minutes.

Shape and cook

  1. Form small dumplings with a spoon.

  2. Put the dumplings into hot soup and boil for eight minutes.

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. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Butter and flour 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
Provides starch and some gluten that help hold the dumplings together.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when heated, giving the dumplings structure.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the dough and contributes richness.

The step that matters

Boil the dumplings in hot soup. Starch in the flour and proteins in the egg set as the dumplings heat through. A vigorous boil can break them apart before they firm up, so the dumplings should be cooked steadily.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Cardamomfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, nutmeg, flour. 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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