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Dessert

Boiled Apple Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet dough and layered apples, sugar, spices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Boiled Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Make a paste with the beef suet, flour, salt, and enough water to form a dough.

  2. Roll out the dough thinly.

  3. Line a well-buttered basin.

Fill and seal

  1. Pare, core, and slice the apples.

  2. Layer the sliced apples in the basin.

  3. Sprinkle sugar, cloves, lemon peel, or nutmeg between each layer of apples as desired.

  4. Add a small piece of fresh butter on top of the apples. Pack the apples tightly.

  5. Cover the apples with a layer of paste. Seal the edges by pressing them down.

Steam

  1. Place the basin in boiling water, ensuring the water does not cover it. Cover the saucepan and steam for three hours.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef suet
Adds richness and tenderness to the paste, keeping the crust moist and short.
All-purpose flour
Forms the dough structure that holds the paste together while it steams.
Apples
Provide the main filling, becoming soft and moist as they steam.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and balances their tartness.

The step that matters

Keeping the water below the basin rim. If boiling water covers the basin, it can seep into the pudding and make the crust soggy. Steaming with the water level kept lower cooks the pudding gently and keeps the crust intact.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, apple, sugar, lemon, nutmeg, butter):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, apple, sugar, lemon, nutmeg, 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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