Skip to main content
Dessert

To Make an Apple Pudding

A boiled apple pudding made with puff pastry, apples, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
To Make an Apple Pudding

Why it works: Apple and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,706 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Make an Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a good puff pastry and roll it out to ½ inch thick.

  2. Peel and core enough apples to fill the crust.

  3. Close the crust and tie it in a cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the pudding: 2 hours for a small one, 3 to 4 hours for a large one.

  2. Once done, turn it out onto a dish, cut a piece from the top crust.

  3. Butter and sugar the exposed filling to your taste, then replace the crust.

  4. Serve hot.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Puff pastry
Forms the crust that encloses the filling and holds the pudding together while boiling.
Apples
Provide the main filling, becoming soft and sweet as they cook inside the pastry.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the exposed filling, enhancing flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the exposed filling and balances the tartness of the apples.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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.

More apple pudding recipes

Baked 128Boiled 64Steamed 30Sago 26Swiss 24Boston 17 See all 461 →

You might also like

Apple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipesApple TartApple Tart24 recipes