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Dessert

Apple Batter Pudding

A baked apple dessert with a batter made from eggs, flour, milk, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,104 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Apple Batter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Core and peel the apples, then place them in a pudding dish.

  2. Fill the cores with sugar, cover the dish, and bake until the apples are tender.

Make and bake the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks until light.

  2. Add the flour, baking powder, milk, and salt to the egg yolks and mix well.

  3. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  4. Pour the batter over the apples and bake for 30 minutes.

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

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

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Apples
Soften during baking and release juice that moistens the pudding around them.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the batter together as it bakes.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they add lift and a light, airy texture.
Egg yolks
Enrich the batter, adding richness, moisture and tenderness.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping it rise and turn light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the apples caramelise slightly in the cores.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air from beating. Stirring them in vigorously knocks that air out, so the pudding bakes flatter and denser instead of light.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, flour, 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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