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Souffles and Puddings

Fried apples coated in flour or batter, cooked in hot lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Souffles and Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Prepare the apples by soaking them in sugar for six hours.

  2. Remove the apples from the sugar and roll them in flour.

Fry

  1. Heat lard in a pan until very hot.

  2. Fry the floured apples in the hot lard until done, then place them on paper to drain.

  3. Alternatively, dip the prepared apples in thick batter and fry them, then arrange them around your dish.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  3. Apple + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Apples
The fruit that is fried, softened and sweetened by the sugar soak.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and draws out moisture during the soak.
Flour
Coats the apples to form a light crust that browns when fried.
Lard
Hot frying fat that cooks the apples and gives the coating a crisp, browned surface.

The step that matters

Frying in very hot lard. If the lard is not very hot, the coating absorbs fat before it sets, leaving the apples greasy and pale rather than crisp. Drain them on paper once fried.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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