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Dessert

Scotch Apple Pudding

A baked apple pudding with a buttery batter, served with hard sauce, whipped cream, marshmallows, and cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cherry match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 295 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Scotch Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the apples

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Place the quartered apples in a 3 lb jar. Grate nutmeg over the apples. Add the butter pieces and water to the jar. Cover the jar.

  3. Cook in the oven until the apples are tender.

Make and bake the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg, melted butter, salt, baking powder, flour, and enough milk to achieve a batter consistency similar to pancake batter. Pour the batter over the cooked apples.

  2. Bake for an additional 25 minutes.

Serve

  1. Once baked, turn the pudding crust side down onto a platter. Spread hard sauce over the top. Cover with whipped cream.

  2. Garnish with hot marshmallows and cherries. Serve hot.

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 + cherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together295 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tart apples
Soften into the moist fruit base that the pudding is built on.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps set it into a structured crust.
Flour
Forms the body of the batter that bakes into the crust.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the crust rises and turns light.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that gives the crust tenderness and flavor.

The step that matters

Cook the apples until tender before adding the batter. The apples must be fully softened before the batter goes on, because the batter bakes quickly and will not cook dense, underdone fruit. Fully tender apples also give a moist base beneath the crust.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Cherrythe original

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