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Dessert

Damson Dumpling

A dumpling made with damsons, flour, butter, and salt, boiled for 1.5 to 2 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Damson Dumpling

Ingredients

Directions

Make and fill the paste

  1. Mix flour and butter to make a hot paste.

  2. Roll it out and lay it in a basin.

  3. Add the damsons in a quantity you prefer.

  4. Wet the edges of the paste and close it tightly.

Cook

  1. Boil it in a cloth for 1.5 hours, or 2 hours if large.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the paste that encloses the filling.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the hot paste rich and tender.
Damsons
Provide tart fruit flavour and juice that moistens the filling as it cooks.

The step that matters

Wet the edges and close the paste tightly. A tight seal keeps boiling water out and the damson juices in, so the filling cooks in its own steam and juice. A gap lets water in and the filling leak out.

“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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