Name: Boiled Apple Pudding
Ingredients: 2 cups all-purpose flour; ½ cup ice water; 4 medium apples, sliced; coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); string for tying

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 Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

In a bowl, mix flour with ice water until a dough forms.
Roll out the dough on a floured surface.
Place the rolled dough into a basin.

Assemble

Add the sliced apples into the dough-lined basin.
Fold the edges of the dough over the apples.
Tie the dough tightly with string and place it in a pot of boiling water.

Steam

Steam the pudding until cooked through.

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

All-purpose flour: Forms the dough that wraps and holds the pudding together while it steams.
Ice water: Hydrates the flour so the dough comes together and stays tender when cold.
Apples: Provide the fruit filling, becoming soft and moist as they steam inside the dough.

“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.