Skip to main content
Dessert

Apple Roly-poly

A sweet apple roll made with suet paste, apples, sugar, nutmeg, and optional currants or raisins, boiled for 1½ hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Apple Roly-poly

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pastry

  1. Make a suet paste by mixing ½ lb flour with suet.

  2. Roll the paste out to ½ inch thick.

Assemble the roll

  1. Peel, core, and cut the apples into half-quarters.

  2. Lay the apples on top of the paste, sprinkle with sugar and nutmeg.

  3. Add currants or raisins if desired.

  4. Roll up the paste, sealing the ends and edges thoroughly.

  5. Wrap in a wetted and floured pudding cloth and tie securely.

Boil

  1. Place in a pan of boiling water and boil for 1½ 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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the fruit filling, becoming soft and tender as they cook.
Flour
Forms the structure of the suet paste that wraps the filling.
Suet
Adds fat to the pastry, keeping it rich and tender during boiling.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple filling and balances its tartness.

The step that matters

Sealing the roll. If the ends and edges are not sealed thoroughly, water can seep into the roll during boiling and the filling can leak out, making the pudding soggy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, nutmeg, 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes