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Dessert

Baked Apple Dumplings

Baked apple dumplings wrapped in dough, dusted with powdered sugar, served with hot sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, lard, butter, and salt.

  2. Gradually add milk to form a paste.

  3. Roll out the dough to less than ½ inch thick and cut into squares.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place a cored apple in the center of each square.

  2. Bring the corners together and seal neatly.

  3. Place in a buttered baking pan with sealed edges down.

  4. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

  5. Brush with egg white before removing from the oven.

Finish and serve

  1. Dust with powdered sugar and serve with hot sweet 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and butter 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the dough's structure once mixed with liquid and rolled out.
Lard
Adds fat that makes the dough tender and flaky as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the dough and helps it brown.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the mixture forms a workable dough.
Apples
Provide the filling, softening and sweetening as they bake inside the pastry.
Egg white
Brushed on before removing from the oven to give the pastry a glossy finish.

The step that matters

Sealing the corners of the dough. Corners that are not sealed firmly can open during baking, letting the filling leak and the pastry lose its shape.

Swap the apple

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

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

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

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