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Dessert

Apple Pudding

A baked apple dish made with a dough crust and boiled apples, spiced and sweetened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Apple Pudding

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Make a stiff paste with flour, suet, salt, and enough water or milk to form a dough.

  2. Knead the dough well.

  3. Roll the dough out thin.

Fill and boil

  1. Line a basin with the rolled dough.

  2. Fill the basin with good boiling apples, peeled, cored, and cut into quarters.

  3. Add grated ginger and other spices if desired.

  4. Cover the apples with a thin layer of dough and boil according to your method.

  5. Once cooked, cut open the top, mix in sugar and butter if desired.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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, giving the pudding body once cooked.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dough rich and tender as it cooks.
Good boiling apples
Provide the main filling, softening as they cook and releasing moisture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tart apples.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding without letting the dough seal poorly. The dough must be sealed over the apples and kept from drying or splitting, so the steam cooks the fruit and the crust stays moist and intact.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, milk, apple, lemon, clove, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, milk, apple, lemon, clove, nutmeg. 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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