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Dessert

Fruit Dumplings

Fruit dumplings made with flour, lard, salt, baking powder, sweet milk, and dried fruit, boiled and served with cream or sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and fig share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 45 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Fruit Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Stir the baking powder into the flour.

  2. Add the lard, salt, and cut fruit.

  3. Mix in the sweet milk lightly.

  4. Break off pieces of dough the size of an egg cup.

  5. Flour your hands and flatten each piece to about ½ inch thick.

Cook and serve

  1. Drop the dumplings into boiling water and boil for 1 hour.

  2. Serve with cold cream and sugar or warm sauce.

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. Peach + figtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together45 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Apple + peachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Apple + figtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together238 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Milk + figtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,026 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping the dumplings rise and turn light.
Lard
Adds fat that tenderises the dough and keeps the crumb short.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flour so the dough holds together into a soft mass.
Dried fruit
Adds sweetness and chewy pieces that stay moist during boiling.

The step that matters

Mix in the sweet milk lightly. Overworking wheat flour dough develops gluten, making dumplings tough and dense rather than tender. Stop mixing as soon as the dough comes together.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, peach, fig):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, peach, fig. 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 fruit dumplings recipes

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