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Rice Dumplings

Rice dumplings made with boiled rice, eggs, salt, Lahmann's Naechsalz, butter, flour, and served with tomato sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice and soak it in cold water.

  2. Boil the rice slowly until well done, then let it cool.

Make and cook the dumplings

  1. In a bowl, combine the cooled rice, eggs, salt, Lahmann's Naechsalz, and beaten butter. Add the flour and mix until well combined.

  2. Form the mixture into small dumplings.

  3. Cook the dumplings in boiling water until they float.

  4. Serve with tomato 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. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Tomato + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,469 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Rice
Forms the bulk of the dumpling and gives it a soft, starchy body once cooked.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help the dumplings hold their shape.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, softening the texture of the dumplings.
All-purpose flour
Absorbs moisture and helps the mixture hold together for shaping.

The step that matters

Cook the dumplings in boiling water until they float. Dumplings cooked in water that is not kept boiling can cook unevenly or fall apart. Floating shows they have risen and are cooked through, so pulling them too early leaves them dense and undercooked.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, egg, butter, flour, sauce. 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.

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