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Dessert

Currant Dumplings

A dumpling made from flour, suet, currants, and water, boiled and served with lemon, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,077 recipes. The science ↓

Currant Dumplings

7 or 8 dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Chop the suet finely and mix it with the flour.

  2. Add the washed, picked, and dried currants.

  3. Mix everything to a limp paste with the water.

Shape and boil

  1. Divide the mixture into 7 or 8 dumplings and tie them in cloths.

  2. Boil for 1½ hours.

  3. If boiled without cloths, drop them into boiling water and stir to prevent sticking.

Serve

  1. Serve with a cut lemon, cold butter, and sifted 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. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the main structure of the dumplings as it binds with the water.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings moist and tender during boiling.
Currants
Add sweetness and fruity flavour throughout the dumplings.
Water
Hydrates the flour so the mixture forms a limp, cohesive paste.

The step that matters

Mixing to a limp paste. Too much water makes the dough slack and sticky, so the dumplings fall apart; too little leaves dry, crumbly pieces. Mixing just until the flour is evenly hydrated keeps the dumplings intact.

“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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