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Dessert

Apple Dumplings

Steamed apple dumplings made with a simple dough and a buttery sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough and dumplings

  1. Mix flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and milk in a bowl to form a dough.

  2. Roll out the dough.

  3. Cover the apples with the rolled dough.

  4. Place the covered apples in a 75‑pint dish and nearly cover them with water.

  5. Put another dish of the same size on top and steam for 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan and stir in flour.

  2. Add boiling water and stir quickly until it boils.

  3. Mix in sugar, nutmeg, and salt, and let it boil.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough and thickens the sauce.
Cream of tartar
Reacts with baking soda to produce gas that lightens the dough.
Baking soda
Releases gas with the acid in cream of tartar, helping the dough rise.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to the dough, helping it hold together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and forms a roux with the flour for the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the boiling water into the butter and flour. Flour clumps when liquid is added to it unless it is stirred constantly. Quick stirring disperses the flour evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, cream, milk, butter, 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.

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