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Dessert

Damson Dumpling

A dumpling filled with damsons, made from a butter and flour dough and boiled.

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 the paste

  1. Make a good hot paste by mixing flour, butter, and water with salt.

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

Fill and close

  1. Add damsons in the quantity you prefer.

  2. Wet the edges of the paste and close it up.

Boil and serve

  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 wraps the fruit while it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the paste rich and tender.
Damsons
Supply the fruit flavour, tartness, and juices that fill the dumpling.

The step that matters

Close the edges tightly. Wet the edges so the paste seals firmly. A tight seal keeps the damson juices inside and stops boiling water from getting in and making the filling watery and diluted.

“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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