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A Common Apple Pudding

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 crust

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

Fill and boil

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

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

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

Optional variations

  1. For added flavor, stir in butter when sweetening, or use nutmeg or cinnamon instead of lemon.

  2. For a richer pudding, use butter for the crust and add marmalade to the apples.

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 structure of the crust that encloses the apples.
Beef suet
Adds fat to the crust, keeping it tender and light as it cooks.
Boiling apples
Provide the filling, softening as they cook into a moist, tart center.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the sweet apple filling.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth loosely enough for the pudding to swell. A flour-and-suet dough rises and expands as it steams, so a cloth tied too tightly can restrict expansion and make the pudding dense. Keeping the cloth lightly tied also lets steam move through, helping the crust cook evenly.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  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, butter, orange. 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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