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Steamed Apple Dumplings

A steamed dumpling made of suet dough wrapped around apple quarters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Steamed Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. In a bowl, mix the suet, flour, and salt thoroughly.

  2. Add cold water gradually to form a paste.

  3. Roll the paste out thin, like pie crust.

Wrap the apples

  1. Peel, quarter, and core the apples, then reassemble the quarters.

  2. Wrap each apple in a square of the paste.

Steam and serve

  1. Grease the bottom of a steamer with butter and place the dumplings inside.

  2. Steam for 1 hour.

  3. Serve with hard sauce or hot cream 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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Suet
Melts during steaming, keeping the paste tender and moist rather than dry and tough.
Flour
Forms the structure of the paste, giving it enough strength to hold the wrapped apples.

The step that matters

Adding the cold water gradually. Flour proteins form gluten as water is added and the dough is worked. Adding water slowly and stopping once a paste forms avoids overworking, which would make the paste tough, and keeps it workable enough to roll thin without tearing.

“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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