Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Green Apple Roll

A roll of sliced apples boiled in water, served with butter and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apple and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,706 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Green Apple Roll

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the apples in a bowl without cooking them.

  2. Cut the prepared paste into 4 pieces and roll each piece out thin.

  3. Spread the chopped apples evenly over the paste, roll it up, and tie in a wet and floured pudding cloth.

  4. Insert a pin in the middle to prevent swelling.

Boil and serve

  1. Drop the rolls into plenty of boiling water and boil for 1 to 1.5 hours.

  2. Serve with butter and sugar hard 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 + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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

Cooking apples
Provide the fruity filling and moisture that steams inside the rolled pastry.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the hard sauce served with the roll.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the hard sauce served alongside the roll.

The step that matters

Boil in plenty of boiling water. Adding the rolls to a large volume of boiling water keeps the temperature high when they go in, so the pastry cooks through evenly and the roll holds its shape.

Swap the apple

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

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

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

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes