Name: Apple Dumpling
Ingredients: 1 quart flour; apples, peeled and cut into small pieces; water; coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Why it works: Flour and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,140 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apple Dumpling

Ingredients

1 quart flour
apples, peeled and cut into small pieces
water
coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

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

Make a crust using flour or a combination of potato and flour.
Fill the crust with the chopped apples, packing them tightly.

Cook

Boil the dumplings in a large pot for one hour, or steam them over boiling water for the same time, keeping the cover on.
Alternatively, bake the dumplings in a biscuit pan at 400°F (200°C) for about one hour, checking for doneness.

Serve

Serve with a foamy sauce or with butter and 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.

Flour + appletop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,140 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour: Forms the dough that wraps and holds the apples together while cooking.
Apples: Provide the fruit filling, adding moisture and sweetness as they soften.

“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.