Skip to main content
Dessert

Baked Apple Dumplings

Apples wrapped in dough, sweetened with sugar, baked until soft.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Baked Apple Dumplings

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix drippings and sifted flour, rubbing it in thoroughly with your hands.

  2. Add coarse sea salt and mix with cold water to form a stiff paste.

  3. Roll out the dough to 1/8 inch thick and cut into 5-inch squares.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pare and core the apples, placing one on each square of dough.

  2. Fill the center of each apple with sugar, then roll them up in the dough.

  3. Bake in a greased pan at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes, or until the apples are soft.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Flour + appletop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Drippings
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, making the dough tender and flaky.
Sifted flour
Forms the gluten structure that holds the dough around the apples.
Apples
Provide the filling, softening and turning sweet and tender as they bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps them caramelize slightly in the center.
Cold water
Hydrates the flour so the dough comes together into a stiff paste.

The step that matters

Rolling the dough thin and even. Dough rolled to the stated 1/8 inch thickness bakes through evenly while the apples soften. Thicker dough can stay raw or doughy around the fruit before the apple is fully cooked.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes