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Dessert

New Year's Baked Apple Pudding

A layered baked apple pudding with currants, raisins, citron, almonds, and suet pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

New Year's Baked Apple Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slack oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the fruit filling

  1. Mince the apples and place them in a saucepan with water. Cook until partly done.

  2. Add currants, raisins, citron, almonds, brown sugar, cinnamon, and allspice. Cook until it forms a thick marmalade.

Make the paste

  1. Make a paste with suet, flour, salt, and cold water. Roll it out thin on a floured surface.

Assemble and bake

  1. Grease a deep bowl with brown sugar and cinnamon.

  2. Cover the bottom with a round piece of paste. Pour a thick layer of marmalade on top, then add another piece of paste.

  3. Repeat until you have three layers of marmalade and four layers of paste, finishing with paste. Place the bowl in a 300°F (150°C) oven and bake slowly for three hours.

  4. When cooked and partly cool, invert onto a round dish, sprinkle with sugar, and return to the oven to heat and glaze. Serve hot.

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. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Almond + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Break down into a soft, thick filling that gives the pudding its moist body.
Suet
Adds richness and tenderness to the paste as it melts during baking.
Flour
Forms the paste's structure, holding the layers together while baking.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps form a glaze when the pudding is sprinkled and reheated.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture to the marmalade filling.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture to the marmalade filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the marmalade until thick. The filling must be cooked down thick so it does not make the paste soggy or leak out during the long, slow bake. Thin filling would turn the layers wet.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, raisin, almond, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, beef):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, raisin, almond, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, beef. 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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