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Dessert

Boiled Apple Dumplings

A boiled dumpling made of flour, suet, salt, and apple, served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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, mix flour, suet, and salt.

  2. Add cold water gradually to form a stiff paste.

  3. Roll the paste into a sheet about ¼ inch thick.

Form the dumplings

  1. Cut the sheet into squares and place an apple in the center of each.

  2. Bring the corners together and pinch the edges to seal.

  3. Prepare small square cloths, dip them in hot water, and flour the inside.

  4. Enclose each dumpling in a cloth, leaving room for expansion, and tie securely with string.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the dumplings for 1 hour.

  2. Remove from the cloth and serve with sweet 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. 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 starchy structure that holds the dough together while it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and rich as it boils.
Cold water
Hydrates the flour into a stiff dough that holds its shape.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling and moisture that cooks inside the dough.

The step that matters

Tie the cloths with room to expand. Dough swells as it heats and starch gelatinizes, so leaving space inside the cloth prevents the dumplings from bursting or becoming compressed and dense while 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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