Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Pudding Dumpling

A dessert of apples cooked with eggs, butter, sugar, and spices, served with sweet sauce or baked in puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Apple Pudding Dumpling

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the boiled dumpling

  1. Make a paste with quartered apples.

  2. Tie the paste in a floured cloth.

  3. Boil for 2 hours.

  4. Serve with sweet sauce.

Make the baked apple pie

  1. Pare and stew 2 quarts of apples.

  2. Mash the stewed apples.

  3. Add 8 eggs, ½ pound of butter, sugar, nutmeg, and grated lemon peel.

  4. Bake on short crust.

  5. Peel and core 6 large apples.

  6. Stew them in 6 tablespoons of water with the rind of a lemon until soft.

  7. Beat the stewed apples to a pulp.

  8. Add 6 ounces of brown sugar, 6 beaten eggs, 1 pint of rich cream, and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice.

  9. Line a dish with puff pastry.

  10. Bake.

  11. Garnish with candied citron and lemon peel.

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 + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set into a custard-like texture when baked.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, silky texture to the apple mixture.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper caramel-like flavor.
Rich cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the custard texture.
Apples
Provide the main body, moisture and flavor of the dish.

The step that matters

Beat the stewed apples to a pulp. If the apples stay lumpy, the filling will have an uneven texture. Smooth, fully broken-down apples blend evenly with the eggs and cream so the custard sets uniformly when baked.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sauce, egg, butter, sugar, nutmeg, lemon. 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.

More apple dumpling recipes

Baked 22Sauce 5Rolled 5Steamed 5Rice 4 See all 55 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes