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Baking Powder Dumplings

Soft dumplings made with flour, butter, milk, baking powder, and salt, dropped into stew.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Baking Powder Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together.

  2. Work in butter with your fingertips.

  3. Gradually add milk, mixing with a fork until the batter is soft enough to drop from a spoon.

Cook and serve

  1. Drop by tablespoonfuls into boiling chicken or meat stew.

  2. Cook for fifteen minutes without removing the lid.

  3. Serve immediately with the stew.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dumplings as it sets around the trapped steam.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the dumplings rise and turn light and fluffy.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the dumpling and gives it a richer flavour.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the batter forms a soft, droppable dough.

The step that matters

Cook without removing the lid. Lifting the lid lets steam escape, which drops the stew temperature and the dumplings can turn heavy and gummy instead of rising through steam.

“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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