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Tomato Dumplings

A dish of tomato dumplings made by dropping batter into boiling tomatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Tomato Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomato base

  1. Combine the can of tomatoes, butter, and sugar in a pot and bring to a hard boil.

Make the batter

  1. Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl; gradually add cold water to form a stiff batter.

Cook the dumplings

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the boiling tomatoes and continue to boil rapidly.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Tomato + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together498 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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
Forms the body of the dumplings, giving them structure as they cook.
Baking powder
Releases gas that makes the dumplings rise and turn light and fluffy.
Tomatoes
Provide the liquid and acidity that form the sauce the dumplings cook in.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the tomatoes with sweetness.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the tomatoes at a rapid boil when adding the batter. Dropping the batter into a gentle simmer can make the dumplings heavy and soggy. A rapid boil sets the outside of each dumpling quickly, helping it hold its shape and cook through in the steam and liquid.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, butter, sugar, 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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