Name: Apple Dumpling
Ingredients: 1 quart flour; 2 tablespoons baking powder; 2 tablespoons lard or butter; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; Water (enough to mix)

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apple Dumpling

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).
In a bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, lard or butter, and salt.
Add enough water to form a soft dough that can be rolled out.

Assemble and cook

Slice the apples thinly.
Roll out the dough and wrap it around the apples to form either one large dumpling or several small ones.
Place the dumplings in a steamer and steam for about 30 minutes.

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.

Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 dough's structure once water is added, giving the wrapper its body.
Baking powder: Releases gas as it reacts, helping the dough rise and turn light.
Lard or butter: Adds fat that tenderises the dough and keeps it from becoming tough.

“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.