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Dessert

Boiled Apple Pudding

A boiled pudding made with apples, suet crust, sugar, lemon peel, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a suet crust using 1 lb of flour.

  2. Butter a basin and line it with some of the crust.

Fill and seal

  1. Pare, core, and slice the apples, then fill the basin with them.

  2. Add sugar, lemon peel, and lemon juice to the apples.

  3. Cover the filling with the remaining crust and pinch the edges together.

Boil and serve

  1. Flour a cloth, place it over the pudding, tie it securely, and submerge in fast-boiling water.

  2. Boil for 1.5 to 2.5 hours, depending on the size of the pudding.

  3. Turn out of the basin and serve immediately.

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

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

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the suet crust that encloses the filling.
Apples
Provide the bulk of the filling and moisture as they soften during boiling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the apples.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple filling.

The step that matters

Boil in fast-boiling water. The cloth must be tied securely and the water kept at a fast boil so the pudding cooks through evenly. Water that drops in temperature or a loose cloth lets water in, which can make the crust soggy and slow the cooking.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, lemon. 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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