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Baked Apple Dumplings

Baked apple dumplings made with tart apples, sugar, quince or apple jelly, and rich biscuit dough.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and quince work together. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Baked Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Pare and core the small tart apples.

  3. Roll the apples in sugar.

  4. Fill the cavity of each apple with quince or apple jelly.

Make the dumplings

  1. Make a rich biscuit dough.

  2. Roll the dough thin.

  3. Cut the dough into squares.

  4. Fold the squares around the apples.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake the dumplings slowly until golden.

  2. Serve with hard sauce or any good pudding 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. Apple + quincetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Quince + biscuittop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Sugar + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Apple + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Small tart apples
Provide the main fruit filling that softens and turns tender during slow baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the coated apples caramelize and brown in the oven.
Quince or apple jelly
Adds concentrated fruit flavor and moisture inside each apple as it melts.
Rich biscuit dough
Forms a tender, flaky pastry wrapper that bakes golden around the apples.

The step that matters

Bake the dumplings slowly until golden. A low oven lets the apples cook through and soften before the dough over-browns. Baking too hot would scorch the pastry while the apple centres stay firm.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, quince, biscuit):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, quince, biscuit. 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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