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Dessert

Baked Apple Dumplings

A baked pastry with apples, sugar, butter, and cinnamon, served with cream or hard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,598 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Baked Apple Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt into a bowl.

  2. Rub in the butter.

  3. Add enough cold milk to make a soft dough.

  4. Turn out onto a board and roll into a sheet.

  5. Cut the dough into squares.

Assemble and bake

  1. Peel and core the apples.

  2. Place an apple on each square of pastry.

  3. Fill the core with sugar, a little butter, and a pinch of cinnamon.

  4. Fold the dough over the apples and place in a buttered pan.

  5. Bake until golden and serve with cream or hard sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough that encloses the apples.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to add tenderness and richness to the pastry.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough so the pastry rises and becomes light.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to bind the dough into a soft, workable pastry.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling that softens and turns sweet and aromatic as it bakes.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, butter, sugar, 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.

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