Skip to main content
Main

Wirsea Keil Potato Dumplings

A boiled potato dumpling made with mashed potatoes, bread crumbs, eggs, and flour, served with gravy.

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

Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Wirsea Keil Potato Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Steam and mash the potatoes.

  2. Mix the mashed potatoes with bread crumbs and beaten eggs.

  3. Add salt and enough flour to form a dough.

Shape and boil

  1. Roll the dough into balls the size of a large egg.

  2. Drop the balls into boiling salted water and boil for about 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Break open and serve immediately with rich gravy.

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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Mashed potatoes
Provide the bulk and soft, starchy body of the dumplings.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture from the potatoes and help the dough hold together.
Eggs
Bind the mixture so the dough holds its shape.
Flour
Gives the dough enough structure to hold its shape in boiling water.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Too little flour lets the dumplings fall apart in the water, while too much makes them dense and heavy. Flour's starch and gluten set the texture as the dumplings cook.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, flour. 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.

More potato dumplings recipes

German 8Boiled 3 See all 44 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes