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Dessert

Baked Apple Dumplings

A pastry dish with apples baked in short pie crust squares, sweetened with sugar and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,598 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Baked Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cut the short pie crust into 5 or 6-inch squares.

  2. Place a pared and cored apple in the center of each square.

  3. Fill the space around the apple with sugar and cinnamon, if desired.

Seal and bake

  1. Wet the edges of the pastry with egg white.

  2. Fold the pastry over the apple, pinch and flute the edges to seal completely.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 to 40 minutes.

  4. Brush the tops with egg white and dust with a little sugar before finishing.

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,058 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Short pie crust
Encloses the apple and bakes into a flaky, golden pastry wrapper.
Apples
Provide the filling that softens and turns sweet-tart as it bakes.
Egg white
Seals the pastry edges and gives the tops a glossy, browned finish.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling caramelize and brown slightly.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, aromatic spice that complements the baked apple.

The step that matters

Sealing the pastry completely. Any gap in the pinched edges lets sugary juices leak out during baking, so the filling can dry out and the pastry can burst or brown unevenly.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon, egg. 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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