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Indian Dumplings

A dumpling made from Indian meal, suet, salt, and milk, boiled and served with meat or sweet accompaniments.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Indian Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix Indian meal with chopped suet and salt.

  2. Gradually add milk to form a stiff dough and knead it.

  3. Divide the dough into equal portions and shape each into a ball the size of a small orange.

  4. Flatten each ball with a rolling pin and beat on both sides to make them light and flaky.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie each dumpling loosely in a floured cloth soaked in hot water.

  2. Boil the dumplings in water for 2 hours.

  3. Before untying the cloth, dip each dumpling in cold water.

  4. Serve hot with boiled meat or as sweet dumplings with treacle or butter and sugar.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Indian meal
Forms the main body of the dumpling and sets as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings moist and tender while boiling.
Milk
Hydrates the meal so it binds into a workable stiff dough.

The step that matters

Before untying the cloth, dip each dumpling in cold water. Brief chilling firms the cooked surface so the dumpling holds its shape when the cloth is removed. Skipping it can leave the dumpling soft and prone to breaking apart.

“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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