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Dessert

Quick Steamed Apple Pudding

A steamed apple pudding topped with a soft dough crust, served with nutmeg or creamy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Quick Steamed Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the apples

  1. Put the apples, water, sugar, and nutmeg into a broad saucepan and set on the fire.

  2. When the apples begin to boil, reduce the heat to cook gently.

Make the crust

  1. Mix the flour, salt, and baking powder together and sift.

  2. Rub the butter into the dry mixture, then add the milk, stirring rapidly to form a soft dough.

  3. Sprinkle flour on a board and roll the dough into a round piece the size of the saucepan top.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the dough on the apples, cover, and continue cooking gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Lift the crust to a plate, turn the apples into a pudding dish, and place the crust over it.

  3. Serve with nutmeg sauce or creamy 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

Apples
Cook down to form the soft fruit base of the pudding.
Flour
Forms the dough's structure, setting the crust as it cooks.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to add tenderness and richness to the crust.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping the crust rise and stay light.
Milk
Moistens the dry mixture into a soft dough.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps them soften as they cook.

The step that matters

Steaming the crust over the apples. The dough must cook covered over gently simmering apples so the steam sets it through. Boiling too hard or lifting the lid early can leave the crust heavy and underdone.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, milk, nutmeg. 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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