Skip to main content
Main

Light Dumplings

Light dumplings made from flour, shortening, salt, baking powder, and sweet milk, steamed over stewed chicken.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Light Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, shortening, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Add sweet milk gradually to form a soft dough.

  3. Cut the dough into proper sizes and shape into balls.

Steam

  1. Place the dumplings on top of stewed chicken, ensuring there's enough liquid to create steam without boiling over.

  2. Steam for 15 minutes.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 main structure of the dough once combined with liquid.
Shortening
Adds fat that tenderizes the dumplings and keeps them soft.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the dumplings rise and lighten while steaming.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flour to form a soft, cohesive dough.

The step that matters

Keep the liquid at a gentle steam. If the stewed chicken boils hard, bubbling liquid can splash onto the dumplings and make them soggy or dense. Steam cooks them evenly while the baking powder lifts the dough.

“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