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Dessert

Boiled Apple Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet pastry and apples, sweetened with brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Boiled Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine the chopped suet, flour, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Mix in enough cold water to form a stiff paste, then cut off one-third of the mixture.

Assemble the pudding

  1. Roll out the remaining dough and use it to line a buttered pudding basin.

  2. Place the quartered apples, brown sugar, and a little water into the basin.

  3. Cover the filling with the remaining pastry.

  4. Tie a floured cloth over the top and place the pudding in boiling water.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for two hours.

  2. Turn the pudding onto a hot dish 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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  3. Flour + appletop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,140 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Suet
Melts during boiling to keep the crust rich and tender.
Flour
Forms the stiff paste that gives the pudding crust its structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the dough as it heats.
Apples
Provide moisture and tart flavor inside the pudding.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses note to the apple filling.

The step that matters

Sealing the pudding before boiling. The cloth must be tied tightly and floured so water cannot seep into the basin and dilute the filling. A floured cloth also keeps the pastry from sticking as it expands.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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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