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Dessert

Apple Marmalade

A baked apple preserve with breadcrumbs, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Apple Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the apple mixture

  1. Boil the apples with a little water and sugar until tender.

  2. Crush the apples and add chopped lemon-peel.

  3. Let the mixture boil away entirely over low heat.

Assemble and bake

  1. Butter a pie dish and cover the bottom and edges with bread-crumbs.

  2. Sprinkle the bread-crumbs with sugar and add the apple mixture, smoothing it over.

  3. Sprinkle more sugar on top and add some butter.

  4. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven until the bread-crumbs are well-browned.

  5. Turn out the dish so the bread-crumbs are on top.

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. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the bulk of the mixture, softening into a thick, spreadable pulp.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the apples thicken and the top caramelise as it bakes.
Bread-crumbs
Form a crisp base and top layer that browns in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the crumbs brown evenly.

The step that matters

Let the mixture boil away entirely over low heat. Excess liquid left in the apple mixture would make the marmalade soggy and stop the bread-crumbs from browning properly. Cooking it down over low heat reduces the moisture gently, so the apples concentrate without scorching.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, butter, 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.

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