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Boiled Apple Dumplings

A boiled dumpling made by wrapping apples in a stiff flour paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boiled Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine flour and salt.

  2. Pour in enough boiling water to form a stiff paste.

  3. Roll the paste to ½ inch thick.

Assemble and cook

  1. Cover each apple with the paste and tie them up separately.

  2. Boil the dumplings until tender.

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 + 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the paste that wraps and holds the apple.
Boiling water
Hydrates the flour and gelatinizes its starch so the paste sets firm and stiff.
Apples
Provide the filling, softening and becoming tender during boiling.

The step that matters

Pouring in the boiling water. Boiling water gelatinizes the flour's starch, so the paste becomes stiff and cohesive. Adding cold or too little water leaves a crumbly dough that may split or fail to hold the apple during boiling.

“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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