Skip to main content
Dessert

Another Apple Sauce

A simple apple sauce made by simmering apples in a sugar-water syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Another Apple Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 1 pint of water and ¼ cup of sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil for about 10 minutes.

Poach the apples

  1. Add enough quartered apples to the syrup to cover them when it boils.

  2. Simmer until the apples are quite tender and transparent.

  3. Carefully remove the apples to maintain their shape.

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. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Sugar and apple 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 fruit that softens and turns tender and translucent as it poaches in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the poaching syrup, which flavours the apples as they cook.

The step that matters

Remove the apples carefully once tender. Apple pieces hold their shape only while their cell walls are intact. Handling them gently and lifting them out as soon as they are tender prevents breaking and overcooking, which would make them mushy.

“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.

More apple sauce recipes

Cake 57Baked 20Brown 15Dried 8Cider 7Spiced 5 See all 252 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes