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Potato Dumplings of Boiled Potatoes

A dish of boiled potato dumplings made with flour, egg, salt, and cream of wheat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 235 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Potato Dumplings of Boiled Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Grate the boiled potatoes.

  2. Mix the grated potatoes with flour, egg, salt, and cream of wheat to form a stiff dough.

  3. Form the mixture into medium-sized balls.

Cook

  1. Boil salted water and add the dumplings.

  2. Cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Place the covered kettle into the Caloric for 1½ hours.

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. Potato + wheattop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Potato + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Flour and egg 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

Boiled potatoes
Provide the starchy base that gives the dumplings their body and texture.
Flour
Adds starch that helps the grated potato hold together as dough.
Egg
Binds the mixture so the dumplings keep their shape during cooking.
Cream of wheat
Absorbs moisture from the potatoes, helping the dough firm up and hold its shape.

The step that matters

Mix to a stiff dough before shaping. Grated potatoes are wet, so the dough needs enough flour and cream of wheat to stiffen. A loose mixture can break apart when the dumplings are added to the boiling water.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, cream, wheat. 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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