Skip to main content
Main

Oxford Dumplings

Boiled dumplings made with sugar, eggs, suet, currants, flour, baking powder, nutmeg, and salt, served with wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Oxford Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the sugar and egg yolks until light.

  2. Add the suet, currants, flour, baking powder, nutmeg, and salt.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

Shape and cook

  1. Flour your hands and shape the mixture into balls the size of an egg.

  2. Wrap each ball in a separate cloth and boil for one hour or more.

  3. Serve with wine sauce.

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 + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter, while whipped whites lighten it and help it rise.
Suet
Melts during boiling, adding fat and moisture that keep the dumplings tender.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the dumplings together as they cook.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking, helping the dumplings rise and become light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the yolks thicken into a smooth base.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Deflating the whipped whites by stirring hard removes the air that lightens the batter, leaving dense dumplings. Gentle folding keeps the air bubbles intact.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, flour, nutmeg):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, flour, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes