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Dessert

Applesauce for Goose

A smooth apple sauce flavored with lemon, sweetened to taste, served warm with goose.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Applesauce for Goose

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, core, and cut up the apples.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the apples with a little water until very tender.

  2. Grate in a bit of lemon peel and add the lemon juice.

  3. Sweeten to taste, then mash the apples until perfectly smooth.

  4. Serve warm.

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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

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

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Apple and sugar 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
Form the bulk of the sauce, breaking down into a soft, smooth purée when stewed and mashed.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet apple flavour and helps balance the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce, balancing the tartness of the apples and lemon.

The step that matters

Stew until very tender. Apples that are not fully softened will stay firm and grainy, so they will not mash into a smooth sauce. Cooking them until very tender lets the pectin and cell walls break down so the purée becomes silky.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar. 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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