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Dessert

Apple-pudding

A boiled apple pudding made with flour, suet, apples, lemon zest, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple-pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a basin and line it with a suet crust.

  2. Fill the basin with the chopped apples.

  3. Add sugar to taste.

  4. Stir in the lemon zest and lemon juice.

  5. Cover with the crust and seal the edges tightly.

  6. Flour a cloth and tie it securely over the pudding.

Steam

  1. Place the basin in a pot of boiling water.

  2. Boil for 1.5 to 2.5 hours, depending on size, ensuring the water remains boiling.

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 + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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
Forms the structure of the suet crust that encloses the filling.
Suet
Adds fat to the crust, giving it a rich, tender texture as it cooks.
Apples
Provide the main filling, softening as they cook and adding moisture.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the sweetness of the apples.

The step that matters

Keep the water boiling throughout. Steaming cooks the pudding through gentle, moist heat. If the water drops below a boil for long, the pudding cooks unevenly and the crust can turn heavy and doughy.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, lemon, 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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