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Dessert

Baked Apple Dumplings

Baked apple dumplings are apples wrapped in pie crust, baked with sugar, lemon extract, butter, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Baked Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Pare and core the apples.

  3. Fill the cavities with sugar and lemon extract.

  4. Enclose each apple in a piece of pie crust and place them in a baking dish.

Add the sliced apples

  1. Slice the remaining apples lengthwise and remove the core from the sliced apples.

  2. Sprinkle the sliced apples with sugar and butter.

  3. Pour water into the dish with the sliced apples.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake all the apples for about 30 minutes, until soft.

  2. Serve hot with thick sweet cream.

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

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

  2. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

Apples
Provide the main body and tart flavour, softening into a tender filling as they bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and dissolves into the juices to form a syrup.
Pie crust
Encloses each apple, holding in juices and sugar while the pastry bakes crisp.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that enhances flavour and helps the apples brown slightly.
Lemon extract
Adds a bright citrus aroma that lifts the sweetness of the apples.

The step that matters

Enclose each apple fully in the pie crust. The crust must seal completely around each apple so the sugar and juices stay inside. A gap lets syrup leak into the dish and leaves the pastry underbaked and soggy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, butter. 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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