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Dessert

A Boiled Apple Pudding

A boiled apple pudding made with apples, bread crumbs, currants, lemon peel, eggs, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,918 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

A Boiled Apple Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Combine chopped apples, bread crumbs, currants, grated lemon peel, beaten eggs, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Mix well until all ingredients are combined.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a pudding cloth or mold.

Boil

  1. Boil in water for three hours.

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 + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  5. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide moisture and tart fruit flavour that balances the sugar.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding its body and soft, sliceable texture.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during boiling to hold the pudding together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the apples.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, bread, lemon, egg, 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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