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
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Chop the suet finely and mix it with the flour.
Add the washed, picked, and dried currants.
Mix the whole to a limp paste with the water.
Divide the mixture into 7 or 8 dumplings.
Boil and serve
Tie them in cloths and boil for 1½ hours.
If boiled without cloths, drop them into boiling water and stir to prevent sticking.
Serve with a cut lemon, cold butter, and sifted sugar.
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.
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Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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 body of the dough, giving the dumplings structure as they cook.
- Suet
- Adds fat that keeps the dumplings moist and rich as they boil.
- Currants
- Provide fruit sweetness and chewy texture throughout each dumpling.
- Water
- Binds the flour, suet and currants into a limp paste.
The step that matters
Stirring boiled dumplings without cloths. If dumplings are dropped into boiling water without cloths, they can stick to the pot or each other. Stirring gently while they first cook keeps them separate and helps them hold their shape.
“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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