Skip to main content
Dessert

A Common Apple Pudding

A simple apple pudding made with flour, suet, apples, lemon, and optional marmalade, boiled in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A Common Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Make a light crust by mixing flour and suet (or butter) until crumbly.

Fill and cook

  1. Roll the dough thin and fill it with the prepared apples.

  2. Add the lemon juice and rind (or nutmeg/cinnamon) to the apples.

  3. Tie the filled crust in a cloth and boil for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

  4. After Christmas, boil for an additional 20 to 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with a small slice of fresh butter stirred in, 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.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

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

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the crust that encloses the apples.
Beef suet
Adds fat that makes the crust light and short; butter can replace it for a richer pudding.
Boiling apples
Provide the bulk of the filling, releasing moisture and tartness as they cook.
Lemon juice and rind
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the sweetness of the apples.

The step that matters

Tie the filled crust in a cloth and boil. The cloth must be secured so the pudding keeps its shape and water cannot seep in. Boiling gently and steadily cooks the dough through without making it soggy.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Blackberryfits about as well
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes