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Dessert

Boiled Apple Pudding

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon 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 filling

  1. Peel and core the apples until they weigh 2 pounds.

  2. Mix the apples with ½ cup sugar, nutmeg, and the grated peel of 1 lemon.

Make and fill the pudding

  1. In a bowl, combine 1 pound chopped suet with 2 pounds flour to make a paste.

  2. Roll out the paste and place the apple mixture in the center.

  3. Fold the paste over the apples and seal it well.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie the pudding in a cloth and boil for 2 to 3 hours.

  2. Serve with cream and sugar or butter and sugar.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 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 main filling, adding moisture and tartness as they cook.
Suet
Adds fat that makes the pastry rich and tender during boiling.
Flour
Forms the paste that wraps the filling and holds the pudding together.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple filling and balances the tartness of the fruit.

The step that matters

Sealing the paste around the apples. If the seal is weak, water can enter during the long boil and make the filling soggy and the pudding fall apart.

Swap the apple

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

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

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