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Dessert

A Common Apple Pudding

A pudding made with a crust of flour and beef suet, filled with boiled apples, lemon juice, and optional butter or 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

Prepare the crust

  1. Mix flour and beef suet to make a light crust, then roll it thin.

Fill and boil

  1. Fill the crust with boiled apples, lemon juice, and rind.

  2. Tie the pudding in a cloth and boil for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

  3. After Christmas, boil for an additional 20 to 30 minutes.

  4. Stir in a small slice of butter when sweetened, if desired.

  5. For a richer pudding, use butter for the crust and 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the light crust that encloses the apples.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the crust light and tender as it boils.
Boiling apples
Provide the main filling, softening into a moist, tart fruit layer.
Lemon juice and rind
Add acidity and aroma that brighten the sweetness of the apples.

The step that matters

Tie the pudding in a cloth and boil for 1 hour and 20 minutes. The cloth must be tied snugly so water cannot enter and soak the crust, and the pudding must boil continuously so the suet-based crust cooks through and stays light.

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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