Skip to main content
Main

Potato Apples

A fried dish of mashed potato shaped like apples, coated in flour, egg, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Potato Apples

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the potato mixture

  1. Mix the potatoes, cayenne, butter, milk, cheese, egg, and salt in the order given and beat thoroughly.

  2. Shape the mixture into small apple forms.

Coat and fry

  1. Roll each apple in flour, then dip in egg, and coat with bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the apples in deep fat until golden brown.

Decorate

  1. Insert a clove at both the stem and blossom end of each apple.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

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

  4. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  5. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Riced potatoes
Form the bulk of the apples and give them a soft, tender interior.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the potato mixture.
Milk
Loosens the potatoes so the mixture is smooth and easy to shape.
Grated cheese
Adds savoury flavour and helps bind the mixture.
Egg
Binds the mixture and, in the coating, helps crumbs adhere.

The step that matters

Coating the apples. Flour, egg and bread crumbs must form an even, unbroken layer so that the apples do not split or leak potato during deep frying.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, milk, cheese, egg, flour, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, milk, cheese, egg, flour, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes