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English Apple Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet crust, apples, sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

English Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the crust

  1. Make a crust by mixing chopped suet, flour, and salt; add cold water to form a dough.

  2. Roll out the dough to about ¾ inch thick.

  3. Butter a pudding bowl with a thick rim and spread the dough over it, pressing it into place evenly.

Fill and cover

  1. Fill the bowl with sliced apples, sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

  2. Trim the crust around the edge of the bowl and roll out the remaining dough to cover the top.

  3. Secure the top crust around the edges of the bowl.

  4. Cover the top with a pudding cloth and tie it tightly under the rim of the bowl.

  5. Fold the corners over the top and secure with a pin.

Cook

  1. Plunge the bowl into boiling water and cook steadily for 1.5 hours.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Chopped suet
Melts during cooking to make the crust rich and tender, adding fat and flakiness.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the crust dough together around the filling.
Sliced apples
Supply the moist, tart fruit filling that cooks down inside the crust.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the apples.

The step that matters

Plunge the bowl into boiling water and cook steadily. The pudding must stay submerged in steadily boiling water for the full time, because the suet and flour need sustained heat to set the crust, and dropping the temperature can leave it heavy and underdone.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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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