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Dessert

Baked Apple Dumplings

A baked dessert of dough-wrapped apple quarters topped with a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Baked Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dumplings

  1. Mix flour and butter until crumbly to form crust.

  2. Roll dough and cut into circles the size of a coffee saucer.

  3. Place four apple quarters in center of each dough circle and fold edges together.

  4. Bake dumplings at 400°F (200°C) for one hour.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, mix sugar, cornstarch, butter, vinegar, and salt.

  2. Pour boiling water into saucepan while stirring briskly, then boil for twenty minutes.

  3. Add lemon extract to sauce.

Serve

  1. Place dumplings on a platter and pour sauce over them.

  2. Serve hot.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  3. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

Flour and butter 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the crust that encloses the apples.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the crust tender and enriches the sauce.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling that softens and flavors the dumplings as they bake.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the sauce and helps it taste balanced against the vinegar.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce as it boils, giving it a glossy, pourable body.

The step that matters

Pour boiling water into the sauce while stirring briskly. Cornstarch must be fully dispersed before and while it heats; adding water while stirring prevents lumps, and boiling activates its thickening so the sauce sets properly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, apple, sugar, vinegar):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, apple, sugar, vinegar. 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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