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Dessert

Boiled Apple Pudding

A boiled pudding made with apples, flour, suet, sugar, and spices, cooked in a tin in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,598 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Boiled Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon or nutmeg, and salt.

  2. Rub the shredded suet into the flour mixture until well combined.

  3. Stir in cold water, then add the apples and sugar, mixing evenly.

Steam and boil

  1. Butter a 2-quart tin pail and pour the batter into it, sealing the lid tightly.

  2. Place the pail in a pot and add boiling water until it is half submerged.

  3. Cover the pot and boil steadily for 3 hours, checking every 30 minutes to add boiling water as needed.

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 + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as its starch sets during cooking.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter so the pudding rises and stays light.
Beef kidney suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and gives it a rich, tender crumb.
Apples
Add moisture and tartness that balance the sweetness of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly and taste rounded.

The step that matters

Keeping the pot boiling with water topped up. The pail must stay half submerged in steadily boiling water for the full 3 hours. If the water drops or stops simmering, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn heavy or gummy.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, cinnamon, beef, 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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