Skip to main content
Main

Sweet Apple Pickle

A pickled apple dish made with sweet apples, sugar, vinegar, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sweet Apple Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the apples.

  2. Dissolve the sugar in the vinegar.

  3. Add the ground nutmeg, whole cloves, and cinnamon to the vinegar mixture.

  4. Combine the apples with the vinegar mixture and stir well.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet apples
Form the bulk of the pickle, supplying the fruit that the syrup penetrates and softens.
Sugar
Dissolves into the vinegar to create a sweet, preserving syrup.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps preserve it.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.
Cinnamon
Adds sweet, warm aroma and flavor to the syrup.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon. 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

Apple SoupApple Soup33 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes