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Dessert

A Common Apple Pudding

A traditional apple pudding made with flour, beef suet, boiled apples, lemon, optional butter, spices, and marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A Common Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix flour and beef suet to make a light crust.

  2. Roll the crust thin and fill it with the boiled apples.

  3. Add the lemon juice and rind, then tie the wrapped pudding in a cloth.

Boil and finish

  1. Boil for 1 hour and 20 minutes before Christmas, then 20–30 minutes longer after Christmas.

  2. Stir in fresh butter when sweetening.

  3. Substitute nutmeg or cinnamon for the lemon rind.

  4. Use butter for the crust.

  5. Add marmalade to the apples.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the main structure of the light crust that holds the filling.
Beef suet
Adds fat to the crust, keeping it light and tender as it cooks.
Boiling apples
Provide the moist, tart filling that the crust encloses.
Lemon
Its juice and rind add acidity and aroma that brighten the apples.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth. The wrapped pudding must be sealed firmly so water cannot enter during boiling, which would make the crust soggy and dilute the filling.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, beef, apple, lemon, butter, orange):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, apple, lemon, butter, orange. 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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