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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

4 or 5 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 4 or 5 dumplings and tie them in cloths.

  2. Boil for about 1½ hours.

  3. If boiling 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 dumpling as its starch sets during boiling.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings tender and moist as they cook.
Currants
Provide sweetness and concentrated fruity flavour throughout the dumplings.

The step that matters

Mix to a limp paste with the water. The water hydrates the flour so it can bind into a cohesive dough. Too little water leaves a crumbly mixture that falls apart, while too much makes a slack paste that becomes heavy and sticky when boiled.

“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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