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Dessert

English Apple Pudding

A steamed apple pudding made with flour, beef suet, salt, and apples, served with a lemon and ginger sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

English Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pastry

  1. Make a paste with the flour, beef suet, salt, and enough cold water to form a dough.

  2. Line a pudding bowl with the paste.

Fill and boil

  1. Fill the bowl with the quartered tart apples and sprinkle a little sugar on top.

  2. Cover with more paste and boil for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  3. Turn out the pudding and serve with a sweet liquid sauce spiced with lemon and ginger.

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. Beef + appletop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 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

Flour
Forms the dough structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the paste tender and moist during boiling.
Tart apples
Provide the main filling, with acidity that balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and adds flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Sealing the paste over the apples. If the top paste is not sealed to the lining, water and steam can escape or seep in, leaving the pudding soggy or the filling watery as it boils.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, 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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