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Dessert

Apple Jonathan

A baked apple dish with bread dough crust, butter, sugar, and optional spices, served warm with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Apple Jonathan

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Work butter into the bread dough until it is short.

  2. Line the sides of a pie dish with the dough.

Bake and assemble

  1. Fill the dish with good cooking apples and cover with a thick layer of dough.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

  3. Remove the crust and turn it bottom up on another dish.

  4. Mix sugar and a small lump of butter with the apples, then spread on the crust.

  5. Add spice if desired.

  6. Serve warm with cream.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread dough
Forms the crust, which is made short by the worked-in butter for a tender, crumbly bite.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the dough and gives the filling a glossy, rich flavour.
Good cooking apples
Provide the main filling, with firm flesh that holds its shape and tartness under baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps them caramelise slightly at the surface.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, sugar, cream. 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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