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Dessert

Boiled Apple Pudding

A boiled pudding made with apples, currants, marmalade, suet, flour, and milk, baked in a buttered bowl.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,104 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Boiled Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub a pudding bowl with butter.

  2. Mix flour, suet, salt, baking powder, and sugar into a paste using milk.

  3. Roll out the paste thinly and line the bowl.

Fill and boil

  1. Layer chopped apples, sugar, and currants in the bowl.

  2. Repeat layers until all ingredients are used.

  3. Cover with paste and tie a wet pudding cloth over it.

  4. Place in boiling water and boil for 2 hours.

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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 paste that encloses the filling.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the paste and keeps it tender as it steams.
Apples
Provide moisture and tartness that flavour the pudding as they soften.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the paste rises and lightens.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form a workable paste.

The step that matters

Tying the pudding cloth. The cloth must be wet and tied snugly so the paste seals around the filling. A loose or dry cloth lets water in or lets the pudding dry out during the long boil.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, milk, 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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