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Dessert

Apple Pudding, Plain

A baked apple dish with a simple batter of flour, butter, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Apple Pudding, Plain

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the apples

  1. Slice tart apples in a deep pie tin.

  2. Dot with small pieces of butter.

  3. Add 2 tablespoons of water and 2 tablespoons of sugar.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix 1 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 1 tablespoon of melted butter, and a pinch of salt.

  2. Add cold water to make a thick batter.

  3. Pour the batter over the apples.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

  2. Serve with maple syrup.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + sugartop 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).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Tart apples
Provide the fruit base that softens and flavours the pudding as it bakes.
Flour
Forms the thick batter that bakes into the pudding's structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the batter rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that helps browning and flavour in the batter and apples.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps them caramelise and brown lightly.

The step that matters

Pour the batter over the apples without stirring it in. The batter must stay on top so the apples cook in their own juices while the topping rises and browns. A batter that is too thin runs down into the fruit and bakes soggy.

Swap the apple

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

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

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