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Dessert

To Make a Baked Apple Pudding

A baked dessert made from apples, butter, eggs, sugar, lemon rinds, and a thin pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Make a Baked Apple Pudding

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

  1. Boil and pound the apples until smooth.

  2. Cream the butter and mix it with the warm apples.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Sift the sugar and lemon rinds into the mixture and combine well.

  5. Line a dish with a thin pastry crust.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes.

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

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

  2. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the bulk and moist body of the pudding filling.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, fat-based texture to the filling.
Eggs
Whipped whites add lightness and help the filling set as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and contributes to browning in the oven.
Lemon rinds
Add aromatic citrus oil for fragrance and a bright flavour.

The step that matters

Folding in the stiff egg whites. Stiff whites hold air that lightens the mixture. Folding gently keeps that air in, so the pudding rises and stays tender instead of deflating and turning dense.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, sugar, lemon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sugar, lemon. 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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