Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Apple Dumplings
Ingredients
Directions
Preheat a pot of water to boiling.
Peel and quarter the apples, removing the cores.
Roll out a piece of puff pastry for each apple.
Wrap each apple in the pastry, shaping it round with a little flour in your hand.
Dip a clean cloth in boiling water, shake flour over it, and tie each dumpling individually.
Place the dumplings in the boiling water and keep it boiling.
Boil small apples for 30 minutes and large apples for 1 hour.
Remove the dumplings and place them in a dish.
Sprinkle fine sugar over the dumplings and serve with melted butter.
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.
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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together8,706 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together16,478 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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
Swap the apple
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter):
- Raisinfits better
- Vanillafits better
- Figfits better
- Applethe original
Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
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