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Dessert

Baked Apple Dumplings

A baked dish of dough filled with sliced tart apples, brushed with milk, served with cream, sugar, fruit sauce or fruit juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Baked Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Add enough butter to the bread dough to make it tender and let it rise.

  2. Roll out the dough to about ⅓ inch thick.

  3. Cut the rolled dough into 4-inch squares.

Shape the dumplings

  1. Place a small quantity of sliced tart apples in the center of each square.

  2. Gather the edges of the dough and pinch them together.

  3. Place the dumplings on a shallow pan a little distance apart.

  4. Let the dumplings rise.

Bake and serve

  1. When light, rub the dumplings with a cloth dipped in milk to make them crisp and glossy.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

  3. Serve with cream and sugar, fruit sauce, or the juice of some fruit.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Ordinary bread dough
Forms the soft, rising pastry that wraps and holds the apple filling.
Butter
Adds fat to the dough, making it more tender.
Tart apples
Provide the fruit filling, whose tartness contrasts with the sweet, rich dough.
Milk
Brushed on before baking to help the surface brown and turn glossy.

The step that matters

Rubbing the risen dumplings with milk. Milk on the surface promotes browning and a glossy finish, but it must be applied only after the dumplings have risen, since rising first lets the dough expand without tearing or setting too early.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, 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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