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Apple Dumplings

Apple dumplings made with mashed potatoes, flour, cinnamon, and apple cores wrapped in dough and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then mash them until smooth.

  2. While the potatoes are hot, mix in the flour without adding water.

  3. Knead the mixture well and roll it out thin.

Fill and cook

  1. Peel and core the apples, then fill the core with a little cinnamon or grated lemon or orange peel.

  2. Wrap each apple in the rolled dough, tie them in a cloth, and boil until cooked.

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. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide moisture and body, so the dough stays soft and tender when rolled.
Flour
Binds the mashed potato into a workable dough that holds its shape around the apples.

The step that matters

Mix the flour into the potatoes while they are hot. Warm potato starch is softer and absorbs flour more evenly, so the dough comes together without added water. Cold potatoes make a crumbly dough that tears when rolled.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, cinnamon, lemon):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, cinnamon, lemon. 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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