Skip to main content
Main

Potato Dumplings

A dish of boiled potato dumplings made with grated potatoes, stale bread, butter, flour, nutmeg, lemon peel, eggs, and browned bread dice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Potato Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil the potatoes in their jackets the day before, then peel and grate them.

  2. Mix the grated potatoes with the stale bread, melted butter, salt, flour, nutmeg, lemon peel, and eggs.

  3. Add the browned bread dice and mix thoroughly.

Cook and serve

  1. Form the mixture into round dumplings.

  2. Place the dumplings in boiling salted water and cook until they float to the top.

  3. Test one dumpling for doneness.

  4. If cooked through, remove all dumplings from the water.

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 + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the dumpling, giving a soft, starchy body once grated and cooked.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together so the dumplings hold their shape in the water.
Stale bread
Absorbs moisture and adds body, so the dumplings hold together rather than turning mushy.
Flour
Helps absorb excess moisture from the potatoes and firms the dough for shaping.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender texture.

The step that matters

Test one dumpling for doneness. Potato dough can be dense or wet in the centre. Testing one dumpling before removing the rest confirms it is cooked through, since the dumplings float before the middle is necessarily done.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Potatothe original

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

More potato dumplings recipes

German 8Boiled 3 See all 44 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes