Skip to main content
Main

English Apple Pudding

A steamed apple pudding made with suet, flour, salt, apples, sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon, cooked in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

English Apple Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA good hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Make a crust by mixing chopped suet, flour, and salt with cold water.

  2. Roll out the dough to about ¾ inch thick.

  3. Butter a pudding bowl and spread the dough over it, pressing it into place evenly.

Fill and seal

  1. Fill the bowl with sliced apples, sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

  2. Trim the crust around the edge of the bowl and roll out the remaining dough to cover the top.

  3. Secure the edges tightly.

  4. Cover the top with a pudding cloth and tie it tightly under the rim of the bowl.

  5. Fold the corners over the top and secure with a pin.

Cook

  1. Plunge the bowl into boiling water and cook for 1.5 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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 cooking to make the crust rich, tender, and flaky.
Flour
Forms the structure of the crust so it holds its shape around the filling.
Sliced apples
Provide the moist, tart fruit filling that softens as the pudding steams.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and adds flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Securing the cloth and sealing the edges. Loose edges or a loose cloth let boiling water seep into the bowl and make the crust soggy. A tight seal keeps steam circulating inside, so the pudding cooks evenly through.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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 SoupApple Soup33 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes