Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Apple Pudding

A boiled pudding made with apples, suet paste, butter, sugar, lemon, nutmeg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Boiled Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the basin

  1. Grease a basin with butter and line it with suet paste.

Fill and seal

  1. Fill the basin with sliced apples, then add sugar, lemon rind, lemon juice, and nutmeg or cinnamon.

  2. Cover the filling with more paste and pinch the edges to seal.

  3. Dust a cloth with flour, place it over the pudding, and tie it down securely.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil or steam the pudding in fast boiling water for at least 2 hours, longer if the pudding is large.

  2. Turn the pudding out of the basin and serve immediately, with or without sauce.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Suet paste
Forms a sturdy, tender pastry casing that holds the filling during boiling.
Apples
Provide the bulk of the filling and soften into a moist, tender fruit layer.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and balances the tartness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the apples fresh-tasting.

The step that matters

Sealing the pudding. If the edges are not pinched firmly closed, steam and filling can escape or water can enter during boiling, leaving the pudding soggy or waterlogged. A tight seal keeps the filling moist and the crust intact.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, lemon, 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