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Dessert

Apple Dumplings

Apple dumplings are steamed apples covered in biscuit crust, served with a butter-sugar-flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 889 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the apples.

  2. Make a biscuit crust.

  3. Place the apples in a dish and sprinkle with a little coarse sea salt.

Steam the dumplings

  1. Cover the apples with the crust and steam for 1.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine 1 cup of sugar, a piece of butter the size of a large egg, and 1 tablespoon of flour in a saucepan.

  2. Add enough water to make the mixture as thin as syrup and heat until smooth.

Serve

  1. Serve the dumplings inverted on a platter with the sauce.

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. Biscuit + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Apples
Provide the fruit filling that softens and becomes tender during steaming.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps it thicken as it heats.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce, giving it a smooth, rounded flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it becomes smooth rather than watery.

The step that matters

Add enough water to make the mixture as thin as syrup and heat until smooth.. Flour thickens only when heated and stirred into liquid, so the mixture must be fully smooth before serving to avoid lumps and an uneven sauce.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, sugar, egg, butter, flour. 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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