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Dessert

Boiled Apple Pudding

A boiled pudding made with apples, currants, marmalade, suet, flour, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 the dough

  1. Rub a pudding bowl with butter.

  2. In a bowl, mix flour, suet, salt, baking powder, and sugar.

  3. Add enough milk to form a paste and roll it out thinly.

  4. Line the buttered bowl with the paste.

Fill and boil

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

  2. Repeat layers until the bowl is full.

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

  4. Place the bowl 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

Apples
Provide the main fruit body and moisture that softens into the filling.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender as it steams.
All-purpose flour
Forms the paste and gives the pudding crust its structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the paste as it cooks.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form a pliable paste.
Marmalade
Adds sweetness and a bitter-citrus flavour to the layers.

The step that matters

Sealing the pudding cloth. A wet pudding cloth tied snugly keeps steam trapped and water out during the long boil. Loose or dry covering lets water seep in and makes the pudding soggy or dense.

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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