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Dessert

Baked Apple Pudding

A baked dessert of stewed apples, bread crumbs, eggs, and butter topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the filling

  1. Stew the apples with the grated lemon rind, 1 cup of sugar, and melted butter until soft.

  2. Add the crumbed bread, egg whites, and egg yolks to the apple mixture and mix well.

Bake and top

  1. Line a baking dish with pastry and pour the apple mixture into it.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  3. Beat the remaining egg whites with 12 tablespoons of sugar until stiff peaks form.

  4. Spread the meringue on top of the pudding and bake until light brown.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

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

  4. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  5. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the bulk and tart flavour that the sweet filling is built around.
Eggs
Set the filling and add richness, while the whites whipped into meringue give the topping its airy structure.
Bread
Crumbs soak up the cooked apple juices and help thicken the filling into a soft, sliceable body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the filling a smoother, more tender texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and, in the meringue, stabilises the whipped whites and helps them brown.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites for the meringue. Whites must be beaten to stiff peaks with sugar and no trace of yolk or fat. Any grease keeps them from whipping fully, and the meringue then falls or weeps in the oven.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, butter, bread, egg. 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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