Skip to main content
Dessert

Currant Dumplings

A dumpling made with flour, suet, currants, and water, boiled and served with lemon, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,077 recipes. The science ↓

Currant Dumplings

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the chopped suet with the flour.

  2. Add the currants and mix to a limp paste with the water.

  3. Divide the mixture into 4 or 5 dumplings.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie each dumpling in a cloth and boil for about 1½ hours.

  2. If boiling without a cloth, drop them into boiling water and stir to prevent sticking.

  3. Serve with a cut lemon, cold butter, and sifted sugar.

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 + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

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 dumpling dough as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dumplings moist and tender while boiling.
Currants
Provide fruit sweetness and flavour throughout the dumplings.
Water
Binds the flour, suet and currants into a limp paste.

The step that matters

Stirring when boiling without a cloth. Dumplings dropped into boiling water can stick to each other and the pot, so stirring gently during the first moments of cooking keeps them separate and intact.

“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

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes