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Dessert

Baked Apple Dumplings

A baked dessert of apples wrapped in biscuit dough and cooked in a sweet butter and sugar liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Baked Apple Dumplings

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

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

  2. Make a rich, stiff biscuit dough by combining flour, lard, butter, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt.

  3. Roll out the dough and cut it into strips.

Assemble and bake

  1. Wrap 2 or 3 strips of dough around 4 pieces of apple for each dumpling, pinching the ends together.

  2. In a baking dish, combine water, sugar, and butter, and bring to a boil on the stove.

  3. Place the dumplings in the boiling mixture and bake until the crust and apples are done.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the biscuit dough that wraps the apples.
Lard
Adds tenderness and flakiness to the rich, stiff biscuit dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the dough to help it rise.
Cream of tartar
Provides acidity that works with baking soda to leaven the dough.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling and soften as the dumplings bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the boiling syrup and helps it thicken and brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Bring the syrup to a full boil before adding the dumplings. Dumplings placed into a boiling liquid begin cooking the crust right away, helping it set and seal. If the liquid is not yet boiling, the dough can absorb it and turn soggy before the apples cook through.

Swap the apple

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

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

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