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Dessert

Apple Dumplings

Apple dumplings made with sweet milk, eggs, baking soda, butter, lard, and quick cooking apples, steamed until cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix sweet milk, eggs, cream of tartar, baking soda, butter, lard, and salt until firm.

  2. Roll the mixture and cut it into nine squares.

Shape and steam

  1. Fill each square with quick cooking apples and shape into dumplings.

  2. Place the dumplings in a steamer, cover tightly, and steam for about 30 minutes.

  3. Serve with your favorite 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness as it steams.
Cream of tartar
Acts with baking soda to produce gas that helps the dumplings rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in cream of tartar to leaven the dough.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor.
Quick cooking apples
Provide the filling, adding moisture and fruit flavor inside each dumpling.

The step that matters

Cover the steamer tightly. Steam is what cooks and sets the dough, and a loose lid lets steam escape, so the dumplings can cook unevenly or turn out dense and wet.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, cream, butter. 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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