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Lemon Dumplings

Lemon dumplings are small bread-based balls flavored with lemon, boiled, and served with wine sauce and sifted sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Lemon Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dumplings

  1. In a bowl, combine grated bread, shredded suet, sugar, lemon juice, and grated lemon peel.

  2. Wet the mixture with milk and mix well.

  3. Spoon the mixture into tea cups.

  4. Boil the cups for 45 minutes.

Serve

  1. Turn the dumplings out onto a dish.

  2. Pour wine sauce around the dumplings and sprinkle with 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the bulk of the dumplings and soaks up moisture to give them body.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings tender and moist as they cook.
Lisbon sugar
Sweetens the dumplings and helps balance the sharp lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright flavor that cuts through the richness of the suet.

The step that matters

Boil the cups for 45 minutes. The mixture must cook through in the steaming liquid without boiling dry or turning soggy. Keeping the water level steady and the heat gentle lets the bread and suet set into a light, cohesive dumpling.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, beef, sugar, milk, wine, sauce):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, beef, sugar, milk, wine, sauce. 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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