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Dessert

Apple Pudding Boiled

A boiled pudding made with suet, flour, apples, and optional sugar, cloves, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,774 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Apple Pudding Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Chop the beef suet very fine.

  2. In a bowl, mix the suet, flour, and salt with your hands.

  3. Make a well in the center, add the egg, and stir with your finger.

  4. Gradually add water to form a stiff paste.

  5. Roll out the paste with a rolling pin two or three times, until it is large enough to hold the apples.

  6. Butter a basin and place the rolled paste inside.

Fill and boil

  1. Stew the apples in a pan with ⅓ cup of water until soft.

  2. Fill the paste with the stewed apples and cover it.

  3. Boil for 1 hour, or 1 hour and 45 minutes if the apples were not stewed.

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 + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 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

Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the paste short and tender as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the paste that holds the filling.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness to the paste.
Apples
Provide the moist, sweet filling that softens during stewing and boiling.

The step that matters

Gradually add water to form a stiff paste. Adding water slowly lets the flour absorb it evenly. Too much water at once makes the paste sticky and hard to roll, while too little leaves it crumbly and prone to tearing around the apples.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, egg, apple, sugar, lemon. 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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