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Dessert

A Common Apple Pudding

A steamed apple pudding made with flour, suet, boiled apples, lemon, optional spices, marmalade, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A Common Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Make a light crust by mixing flour and suet.

  2. Roll the dough thin and fill it with the apples.

  3. Add lemon juice and rind, then tie it in a cloth.

Boil

  1. Boil for 1 hour and 20 minutes before Christmas, then 20 to 30 minutes longer after Christmas.

Finish

  1. Stir in butter when sweetened, if desired.

  2. For a richer pudding, use butter instead of suet and add marmalade.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the dough that wraps and holds the filling together.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and moist as it cooks.
Boiling apples
Provide the moist, soft filling that cooks inside the crust.
Lemon
Its juice adds acidity and its rind adds bright aroma to the apples.

The step that matters

Boiling time. The long boil cooks the suet crust through and softens the apples inside the cloth. Flour starch only sets fully with sustained heat, so cutting the time can leave a doughy, underdone centre.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, beef, apple, lemon, orange, butter):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, apple, lemon, orange, butter. 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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