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Potato Dumplings

Potato dumplings made from mashed potatoes, flour, spices, and croutons, boiled until cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil, peel, and mash the potatoes.

  2. Add flour, salt, pepper, and nutmeg to the mashed potatoes.

  3. Prepare boiling salted water.

  4. Drop a tablespoon of the batter into the boiling water. If the batter breaks apart, add more flour and test again.

Shape the dumplings

  1. Flatten a tablespoon of the mixture in your hand.

  2. Place 4 or 5 croutons in the center of the flattened mixture.

  3. Roll the mixture into a ball.

  4. Repeat steps 6-8 until all the mixture is used.

Cook and serve

  1. Drop the dumplings into the boiling water.

  2. Lower the heat and cook uncovered for about 6 minutes.

  3. Remove the dumplings with a slotted spoon.

  4. Serve plain or roll in buttered crumbs.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. 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

Potatoes
Provide the bulk and starch that give the dumplings their body.
Flour
Binds the mashed potato so the dumplings hold together while cooking.

The step that matters

Testing the batter in boiling water. If the mixture is too wet, the dumplings break apart in the pot. A test dumpling shows whether more flour is needed before shaping the whole batch.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, nutmeg, butter. 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.

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