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Savoury Suet Dumplings

A dumpling made with flour, suet, herbs, and salt, cooked with mutton or separately.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Savoury Suet Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl.

  2. Mix to form a stiff paste, adding cold water as needed.

Shape and cook

  1. Shape the mixture into balls using floured hands.

  2. Cook the dumplings with mutton or in a separate saucepan.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + thymetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Thyme + beeftop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,051 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Beef + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 structure of the dough, binding it into a stiff paste.
Chopped beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings tender and moist as they cook.

Swap the thyme

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, beef, parsley):

  1. Marjoramfits about as well
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Thymethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, parsley. 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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