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Dessert

Cold Apple Pudding

A chilled dessert made from apples, butter, sugar, nutmeg, lemon peel, and baked in a mold lined with pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cold Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a sauté pan, combine the apples, butter, nutmeg, lemon peel, and sugar.

  2. Cook until the fruit is softened, then set aside to cool.

Assemble and boil

  1. Line a mold with pudding paste or pie crust.

  2. Fill the mold with the apple mixture and cover with paste.

  3. Tie the mold in a cloth and boil for 1 1/2 hours.

Serve

  1. Turn out the pudding and decorate with a flower on top.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

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

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Baking apples
Provide the bulk of the filling and, once softened, its moist, sweet body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the cooked apples.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps them soften and form a thick, jammy filling.
Lemon peel
Adds bright aromatic oils that balance the sweetness of the apples.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour to the apple filling.

The step that matters

Cook the apples until softened, then cool them before filling. Apples that are not cooked enough stay firm and can release water into the pudding, while filling the mold with hot mixture can soften the paste before boiling. Cooling the filling first helps the crust hold its shape.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg, 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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